Religion: Intimate Work

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The minister of today . . . who does not avail himself of contemporary psychology's invaluable contribution is neglecting an indispensable resource for effectiveness in his work. To know how character is formed, deformed and reformed is basic. . . . Because of ignorance of this available information, many ministers in dealing with personal problems are doing far more harm than good.—Harry Emerson Fosdick.

More and more ministers are studying inferiority complexes and suppressed desires, frustration and the subconscious mind, to put psychiatry to practical use in their pastoral work. Last week 200 of them from all over the country highlighted the trend by winding up Chicago's tenth annual Pastors' Institute with a five-day conference on "Religion and Personality Integration." They wanted to know how they could help parents and children to get along, particularly when they suspected it was the parents' immaturity that was causing the trouble. Where does the minister leave off in premarital counseling and let the physician begin? What does a pastor do about a woman who buries herself in church work, then uses her "nobility" to convince her hard-working husband that he is not as good as she is?

Asked what was their chief personal problem, the pastors at Chicago put their families far in the lead. The average minister seems to have more trouble adjusting to his family than to his congregation. Sample problems: a pastor whose wife was so active in the parish that he felt she was doing a better job than he and so felt inferior, children who did not behave as the congregation thought they should, a wife who was jealous of her husband's contacts with his women parishioners. Other pastoral worries: getting the jitters in the pulpit, inability to face the congregation while preaching, how to avoid getting too closely involved with certain members of the parish.

The conference was led by Rev. Otis Radcliffe Rice, instructor in pastoral psychology at Manhattan's General Theological Seminary, and Dr. Smiley Blanton, Manhattan psychiatrist. No denomination has officially condemned its pastors' use of psychiatry, but many a cleric and layman looks askance at the idea. One result last week was that while the ministers attending the Chicago conference were loud in their praises of it, they did not want to give their names for fear it would get back to their parishes that they were enrolled in it.