Religion: Learning from Psychiatry

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The woman had attempted suicide—traditionally considered by Christianity to be one of the most serious sins. But when she consulted Dr. Edward Stein, a professor of pastoral counseling at San Francisco Theological Seminary, he gave her no lecture on God's grace. Instead, in the course of a sympathetic conversation, he discovered that as a child the woman had never been allowed to express anger. Concluding that her attempt at self-murder was basically an expression of long-repressed rage, Stein tried to show her the underlying reasons behind her suicidal urges, and encouraged her to follow the counsel of a professional psychiatrist.

Today, U.S. clergymen openly acknowledge the debt that they owe to the once scorned science of psychiatry. Learning to understand its techniques and benefits is now an essential part of clerical training; in recent years courses dealing with the emotionally disturbed have become standard fixtures in U.S. seminaries. This semester, for example, 82 Harvard divinity students are working as apprentice counselors in mental hospitals and other institutions as part of their training. Workshops in pastoral counseling for parish ministers have mushroomed. The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Detroit holds a weekly seminar for priests conducted by a psychiatrist; more than 500 clergymen now study annually at the famed Menninger psychiatric clinic in Topeka, Kans. In many U.S. cities, churches have established their own mental-health clinics, manned by both psychiatrists and clergymen trained in counseling.

Finding the Choice. Christian moralists readily use the insights of psychiatry in trying to determine what constitutes sin and sinfulness. An example is psychiatric discoveries about the ways in which man's subconscious drives and fears limit his freedom of choice. "We cannot take away the fact that man is capable of sin and has free choice between good and evil," says the Rev. John Lind, assistant pastor of New York City's Roman Catholic Church of the Resurrection-Ascension. "The great theological problem is to determine what our free choices are. With the help of psychology, we are beginning to understand that there are forces at work in a human being that can lessen his culpability."

Sexuality is a specific area of moral concern in which psychiatry has helped religion redefine its concept of sin. In the past, Christian moralists almost unanimously regarded fornication as an unqualified evil. Now, some churchmen are inclined to admit that it may be morally permissible, in those rare situations when it satisfies a true need between two adults who fulfill each other. Says Dr. Edward Craig Hobbs of the Episcopal Church Divinity School of the Pacific: "The whole matter of sexual morality is now subject to a different understanding that comes from psychiatry and ultimately from Freud." The Rev. Richard Deam of the First Baptist Church in Brewster, N.Y., says that a course in pastoral psychology taught him that "anger is not always wrong. It can be a healthy, constructive emotion, as when Christ forced the moneylenders from the Temple."