Psychiatry and Theology
215
Bridging the Gap between Psychiatry and Theology
RALPH WENDELL BURHOE Both religion and psychiatry are engaged in saving souls. "Psychiatry" comes from two Greek words meaning soul and saving. And, if, as we should to be realistic, we go below the level of verbal correlations to actual histories of religion and psychiatry and examine what their operations seem to be aimed at, we find much overlap in goals: to prevent or to heal a broad range of debilitating disturbances of personal behavior commonly involving emotional distress and relations to other persons. However, psychiatry during the past century seems to represent another element of the art of healing man that has seceded from adherence within the "spiritualist" ideology and gone over to the "materialist" ideology, even though in some of the schools of psychiatry the hypothetical entities, such as "id" or "superego," have not always been much more dearly substantiated as observable entities than have gods or evil spirits. In any case, psychiatry has tried to become scientific in its understanding and treatment of emotional and behavioral disorders. As such its ideology and the rituals or practices it prescribes have separated themselves from the theological models and religious practices for healing the soul. Moreover, psychiatry has commonly been looked on by the church as more of a heresy than has general medicine, partly because the tatter's separation was largely accomplished a long time ago, but also because the former purports in some sense to save souls. In spite of the admitted disjunction or heresy of psychiatry from theology, their community of goals in healing souls has tended to foster some relationship, particularly at the level of practice. Beginning in United States Protestantism some A paper delivered at the March 6, 5968, meeting of the Chicago Branch of the Academy of Religion and Mental Health.
216
lournaI of Religion and Health
four decades ago, touched off in large measure by the efforts of that disturbed soul, Anton T. Boisen, a movement to embrace psychiatry in theological education has now reached the point where more than two hundred Protestant seminaries have programs in dinical pastoral training, and there are over three hundred related programs altogether. There are numerous societies---local, regional, or national--including the Academy of Religion and Mental Health. There are a few journals devoted primarily (and many partially) to this interrelation of psychiatry and religion, and there is an endless stream of books. But, for understandable reasons, most of this activity is directed at a co-operation in practice more than to a common theory for saving souls. Although there is some apologetic interpretation by a few theologians and an occasional psychiatrist, there is within the movement seldom any direct confrontation at the theoretical level between the fundamentals of theology and psychiatry. The critical test of the value of any real integration at the theoretical level would be the involvement of theologians and theological doctrine in medical schools, along with biochemists and biochemistry, t ~ instruct in the art of healing souls. This test is flunked. The disjunction at the theoretical level is repressed to allow the continuation of the practical co-operation and mutual benefits of the two professional groups. Outside the co-operative movement, of course, one can find open attacks and expressions of full disdain of the other party at the theoretical level. But inside the cooperative movement there is a strong inhibition both by suppression as well as by repression--of the underlying conflict between theological and psychiatric doctrines of man and the world. I have been sufficiently intimate and neutral with people great and small in both professions to have some confidence in saying something that I seldom find fully faced either in print or in the polite relations of mixed groups: Behind the surface of the polite public face of this co-operation there lies a considerable constellation of dislike, disdain, distrust, and fear. The basic questions of this paper are: Does the suppression of the theoretical disjunction of the two institutions allow the best prognosis for long-term co-operation? Can the disparateness of theology and psychiatry at the theoretical level be bridged to the advantage of both? Let me represent my version of the situation between these two titans, theology and psychiatry, in the hyperbolic metaphor of a story of the gods.
Psychiatry and Theology
217
Psychiatry is the reputed bastard son of Queen Mother Judaeo-Christian Religion, and his oedipal urges now lead him to attempt to cajole minor services out of his mother. He seduces and dominates her with his sly, indirect confirmations of the widespread rumor that her husband, God, is dead and irrelevant, and that he, Psychiatry, is now king of her realm of saving souls. Her belief in, and faithfulness to, her former spouse have been truly shaken, and she is slowly warming up to Psychiatry because her instincts tell her that his aim to save souls is a common cause with hers. Concurrently, in the lower realm of individual men, her priests have been increasingly serving as lackeys to the new king while quietly suppressing their former association with the now defamed Christ, or outrightly dedaring in the hospital corridors that they never knew him, that God is dead, and long live Psychiatry and the secular gods ! In truth, however, the rumor that the sovereign Lord of All Life is dead is false. Queen Mother Religion has only been blinded by a combination of her own narcissism and the baffling, bright, new lights of her children the Sciences to the point where she can no longer see her Lord clearly, if at all. Her children, the Sdences, induding Psychiatry, cannot see their father because they cannot see beyond the ends of their noses, a peculiar myopic malady that comes from keeping their noses too close to their grindstones. Meanwhile, the whole integrity of the realm of the gods is being threatened by a revolution of some sons of the Sciences, born out of ill-considered or illegitimate intercourse of the Sciences with various seductive sirens of the arts of government, commerce, communications, industry, and the military. These rapacious grandchildren, some of whom have never heard of their grandfather, the Lord of the Cosmos, and others of whom readily believe the rumors that the Lord is dead, naturally do not believe that a nonexistent Lord imposes any necessary order in the realm of life. And this unruly mob of bastard sons and daughters of the arts and sciences--induding such characters as T.V. Radio, Vaginal Coil, Atom Weapon, Jet Transport, Automation, Cybernetic Machinery, and Declining Deathrate-have without rhyme or reason taken into their hands the world's several separate warp strands of pre-existing cultures, which were more or less integrated when they were separate, and hurled through them in disorderly array these multicolored technological woof strands to make such a confusing two-dimensional pattern of mismatched, unravelling, and broken threads, that in the twentieth century the men of the world are going crazy in disorientation and disorganization.
218
Journal of Religion and Health
The god Psychiatry in his nose-long myopia knows little or nothing about what his scientific brothers have been cooking up in their laboratories of the Multidiversity, or what crazy distortions of psyches will be produced by his unruly nephews and nieces who are simultaneously interweaving and breaking cultural patterns in an unholy mess. It looks doubtful that he is big enough to be king of the realm of mental health in the disorderly world that they have brought about. Queen Mother Religion in her blindness sees little of the implications of research in Multidiversity, although she hears with sorrowful heart the cries of the afflicted in the disordered world brought into being by her grandchildren. However, so long as her eyes cannot adapt themselves to seeing her lost husband in the suddenly bright illumination of reality made by her scientific sons, she is impotent to help. No release from the impending catastrophic collapse of order and life in the world seems likely unless the Queen Mother or one of her daughters can learn to see more dearly and interpret again more effectively the whole, sovereign reality on whose laws all life depends. There is the Herculean double task of bringing not only the multiracial, multinational, and multicultural gods of the various peoples of the world under the order and law of one sovereign God, but there is the equally difficult task of bringing the various gods of the woof strands of Multidiversity under the same sovereign. Only then can the true and necessary order for world society of men in an age of science be achieved. Only then could Prince Psychiatry effectively co-operate with his Queen Mother in the salvation of souls with full respect for her authority, and only then could the Queen Mother have full confidence that her son Psychiatry could play a proper and effective role in this task. I wish to suggest some brief documentation of this tale of the gods. That the sciences generally are children of the Judaeo-Christian culture is immediately apparent from the cirde out of which they were conceived and born, primarily within a circle of less than a thousand-mile radius from Basel, Switzerland, during the past few centuries when Queen Mother Christendom had reached her maturity there. The physicist C. F. von Weizs~cker, among others, has traced the birth of the sciences more deeply in terms of ideas and attitudes into the womb of Christendom. He says: "I called modern science a legacy, I might have said a child, of Christianity.''1 The birth of Psychiatry during the past century from this same womb has been described recently by Francis Braceland.s That Psychiatry is
Psychiatry and Theology
219
reputedly a bastard stems from the general notions, including those of Braceland, that medicine and the sciences generally are offspring of pre-Christian Greek "science." But the question of bastardy is in my opinion doubtful if one takes into account an understanding of the essential identity of the Greek and Judaic notions of the One, Eternal, Sovereign God united in Christian theology. However, that in the minds of psychiatrists and the educated public the programs in mental health derive their basic theory from doctrines that are at variance with Christian theology is widely documented and expressed in practice. Freud's Future of an Iltusion is symbolic. I have all my life, as a layman in both religion and psychiatry, observed that when the psychiatrist calls upon the clergyman for help, it is not usually a consultation for expert advice on how theology can contribute to the patient's therapy. The clergyman may perform various useful chores, although there is always the fear that the clergyman's religious beliefs may get in the way and spoil the "scientific" rituals of medicine. Even when mental health professionals look beyond their usual frames of reference of spotting some trouble in the internal somatic or psychic machinery and begin to see etiology and therapy as involving society, and even philosophy or some holistic view of man and the world, as some of them are increasingly doing, any role for the church seems to be largely bypassed, and if mentioned it is given a subsidiary role. In a recent discussion of "The Prospects of Psychiatry" before the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Seymour S. Kety and John P. Spiegel talked about biochemistry and community mental health projects, and Spiegel noted that "the framework of a determined social therapy must rest on the development of an integrated theory of human behavior, a theory which has not yet been devised"; but they did not mention Christian theology's doctrine of God or man, or even an important role for the church.8 Edward S. Rogers, of the School of Public Health at the University of California at Berkeley, presents another argument to the effect that tracing the etiology or effecting a cure calls for a much greater scope than is customarily given in public health, and he suggests that the health sciences cannot resolve their problems without involving and understanding "the determining role of human values": "It is' necessary to know why, and in relation to what, health is valued.''4 He considers calling for help from the moral philosophers, but not from the theologians. However, he dismisses even the philosophers because he does not expect any adequate answers from them soon enough;
220
Journal of Religion and Health
and, "to provide a rational answer to questions of such magnitude," he calls for a scientific approach to "some master conceptualization of the nature of human goals and the various alternative ways of attaining them," a "holistic ecological concept of human organization." But no mention is made of theology or the church. Even where programs of co-operation between psychiatry and religion are set up in the highest hopes and most polite terms, we inevitably find the same expression of faith in the relevance of psychiatric doctrine and the bypassing or dismissal of theological doctrine as possibly a nuisance or even dangerous for the proper healing of souls. The original ~959 brochure for the famous Menninger Foundation "Program in Religion and Psychiatry" states on page 4: In the context of the Foundation's purposes, there are two senses in which religion... may be considered a "related discipline" to psychiatry. First, representatives of religious institutions may improve the human relations aspect of their work by learning certain things from psychiatry. Second, psychiatrists.., may more effectively aid some people if they grasp the significance of certain religious factors in their lives. I take "their lives" to refer not to "psychiatrists" but to "some people," since this way the sentence makes much more sense in context. But note the one-way-street character here, as in almost any place you look, of the relationship of religion and psychiatry: religion appears as a symptom to be understood, not as an agent in producing-mental health. I do not yet know of any medical school that imports theologians to inform psychiatrists about how to save souls. Even among the clergy, the inferiority or irrelevance of theology or religion for mental health is publicly as well as privately recognized. Richard V. McCann's study of The Churches and Mental Health states: From our survey [of a national sample of clergymen] a picture emerges not of clergymen with serene confidence in religion, in the church, in themselves when confronted with mental health problems, but rather of men in a dilemma: considerable ambivalence about the efficacy of religious resources, and at the same time reservations and anxiety about referring parishioners to psychiatrists and other professional resources,s What is more, theologians as well as secular historians and social analysts are saying that psychiatry has become a kind of religion with prophetic and priestly functions. I cite as an example theologian Daniel Day Williams: One could make a strong case that the major role of psychiatry (I use the term in a broad
Psychiatry and Theology
221
sense) is priestly. There is the mediation of a healing reality to people who are anxious and hurt. There is the penetration to the deeper levels of guilt, estrangement, and loneliness. There is the offer of release and new freedom. The mode of ministry is personal, caring, and patient. There is the confessional, and a form of absolution based on discovery of the roots of guilt feelings. And there is the hope of a life released for love, and coping with the problems of existence. It is more difficult to make a case for psychiatry's fulfillment of the role of providing a structure for belief. . . . But the prophet role is present also. Sigmund Freud surely has prophetic stature in the attack on the mind-set of Victorian society, his discovery of a new world of forces and structures in the person, and his critique of religion and civilization.6 Possibly care for the health of the soul, prophylactic as well as therapeutic, will in the next few decades be transferred from the churches to the new Community Health Centers, of which some five or six hundred are expected to be in operation by ~97o, according to Stanley F. Yolles, Director of the National Institute of Mental Healthy Such Community Health Centers begin to look like churches, except that their "theology" comes from psychiatry. These few examples seem to be from an almost inexhaustible literature that predominantly indicates that Queen Mother Religion is gradually yielding to the regnancy of her son Psychiatry in the realm of the cure of souls. While clergy increasingly study or even preach from prophet Freud and other prophets of psychiatry, what are the evidences of reciprocal private or formal study by psychiatrists of theological doctrines to supplement those from biochemistry, behaviorism, or Freud? But I have thus far been suggesting some documentation of only the first part of my myth of the gods in mental health, the aspirations of Prince Psychiatry to regnancy while Queen Mother Religion is declining in power. I think we can document the rest of it, too. However, the second stage of the myth, the handwriting on the wall of the world of Muhidiversity into which the gods have thrown us, proclaiming an anarchy and imminent doom if some order is not provided to integrate the various pre-existing cultures and new technological compartmentalizations, is plain for all to see. I cannot take time here to justify these signs of our tribulations. The quotations from Spiegel and Rogers on the need, felt in the scientific mental health profession itself, to include the whole picture of human values in its larger eco-
222
Journal of Religion and Health
logical setting is evidence that Psychiatry as it now stands is not capable of the over-all task of human salvation. Lawrence K. Frank about three decades ago led the way to the notion that perhaps it was society, not the individual, that was sick.s The Yolles paper cited is typical of many that point out the prophylactic if not therapeutic values of religion for the health of both society and the individual, although the author does not, of course, tell us how religion with a dead God or failure of belief can be effective. The psychologist O. H. Mowrer, whose relevance is somewhat prediscounted in some psychiatric cirdes, has challenged the efficacy of the Freudian type of psychiatry and condemns Christianity for giving up its doctrines of sin, repentance, and restitution. 9 He is not alone in this protest. Many inside and outside psychiatry proper acknowledge that psychiatry is not at present adequately equipped to engage in the therapy of the sick society, to say nothing of dealing with the problem of man's hope and purpose in the total world. Even Freud acknowledged that "Only religion is able to answer the question of the purpose of life. m~ My own grounds for the prophecy in the final part of the story of the contemporary gods, the prophecy of the restoration of Theology as Queen of the Sciences to take a central role in the cure or care of souls, are perhaps too complex for this paper. The evidence of the coming of the much-needed water of life is as yet only a small cloud on the horizon. Some of the evidence may be implicit in the establishment of the Center for Advanced Study in Theology and the Sciences under the Meadville Theological School in Chicago in i964, and in ~966 the publication of Zygon, Journal of Re-
ligion and Science. The Center's function has been described as one "to examine and reinterpret man's religious and moral heritage in the light of the new understandings of the world and human nature engendered by the sciences." This year one post-doctoral Fellow at the Center is an East-Coast Protestant theologian and another is a WestCoast biochemist with no formal church affiliation at present. They are working creatively together on such problems as examining the validity of the efforts of the Jesuit Father Teilhard de Chardin to be faith~l to both theology and the theory of evolution, and seeing if perchance they can themselves provide some scientificallygrounded illumination of man's religious problems. Zygon is cosponsored by the Meadville Theological School and the Institute on
Psychiatry and Theology
223
Religion in an Age of Science. The latter was established in i954 as an independent society of scientific and religious professionals and laymen who "felt that, when a new 'theology' for the ages dawns, it will be only after the scientific world view is incorporated in it." Since ~954 IRAS has held each summer a week-long national conference in this effort, as well as numerous more limited meetings. Of interest to those concerned with religion and mental health is the following quotation from Zygon's first editorial (March "r : To conserve the subtle values that still remain valid heritages from a long historical experience and yet to meet the conditions of a new age, we suggest that the problem of religious reform is essentially akin to that of the reform of medicine, which is a cultural institution closely tied to religion in human history. In both institutions we see a long history of wisdom from the past fusing with newer wisdom, and one does not see this evolution as being brought about by brash reforms that throw out all that is old because of some corrective new insights. In both medicine and religion we see sacred values and wisdom implicit in the prescientific accumulations of cultural wisdom as still valid and essential . . . . And for religion as for medicine, we see the new revelations of the sciences as a boon for better theory and practice to meet the requirements of life in a new age. . . . . We recognize that the ultimate judgment and selection of human beliefs and behaviors are made, not by the wisdom or foolishness of men, but by historical forces that far transcend our puny wisdom fully to comprehend. The dozens of papers by scientists and theologians that have thus far appeared in Zygon may have some implications for the possibility of what Henry Alexander Murray calls a "Mythology for Grownups," a new bible, or a new "world testament. ''n We look toward a theology that may integrate with contemporary world views, one that also embodies the broad wisdom of the great religious traditions and is not limited to the incomplete fragments of life's values characteristic of some of the recent psychosocial or political programs of human salvation. It Seems to me that related evidence is inherent in the quotation above from Edward Rogers: that scientific approaches to health require ultimately "some master conceptualization of the nature of human goals," some "holistic ecological concept of human organization." This, I venture to suggest, is another way of calling for a theology. Scientists, including psychiatrists, in contemplating the elements involved in mental health, are being forced to look beyond the skull and gonads to the social structures of world society and ultimately to the total ecology of man.
224
]ournat of Religion and Health
This begins to look like a convergence toward the ground of being, toward the ultimate reality that creates and sustains our lives. For the sciences, as for the traditional religions, man is ultimately dependent upon a world he did not make, a world that made him, a world from the inevitable judgment of whose laws and overarching realities he has no escape. He must either adapt or cease to be. In theological language this is akin to man's duty and privilege to trust in his creator and sustainer and forever to seek to know his law and live accordingly. Traditionally religion and its theoretical concepts (theology) have had this broad, holistic, ecological, even cosmic perspective on what is wise and healthy for man's ultimate concerns, although it naturally has been expressed in the world views of the surrounding cultures. I would point out the observation of the anthropologist Melford E. Spiro, among others, that primitive religious "myths" or beliefs at their time of origin and ascendency are (in spite of a widespread notion to the contrary) never far from being integrated with the generally accepted knowledge or science of their times and places. TM This desire for justification relative to the currently held world views extends to and is manifest in the higher religions, like Christianity, although Christianity had a hard time adapting to the Greek world view, and although since the birth of the modern sciences we are living in a time of unprecedentedly rapid innovation in our pictures of reality to which our theologians have not very adequately adapted. The medical theorists and practitioners themselves have not always kept au courant with the sciences. I do not doubt that theologians will soon be able to relate the new scientific knowledge to the basic import of major religious doctrines or theories of the JudaeoChristian tradition, which the Queen of the Sciences in the past so successfully adapted to the older world views of the Mediterranean basin. I suspect that many of the critical doctrines of the Christian church and also of other major religions, when properly translated into the languages of the new sciences, will be confirmed and extended rather than lost in the process. Some doctrines and practices will no doubt be revised rather radically to new and more effective patterns, as have been many in medicine, and no one will be either sorry for the losses or less appreciative of the ancient wisdom that will be revitalized for our contemporary prophylaxis and therapy of human souls. Psychiatry will continue, I suggest, but as an integrated section of a much
Psychiatry and Theology
225
broader, more social, and more cosmic theological conceptual system for man's adaptation of his internal nature to the total social and cosmic reality in which he lives and has his being. Actually, the anticipated integration of theology with the sciences may become, I suggest, a prior source for reducing some of the confusion of doctrines found today within the psychiatric profession, even before the several psychiatric schools themselves are able to accomplish this integration. I prophesy that within very few decades the potentialities and pressures in process today will bring us to the point where a scientifically-integrated species of theologians and practicing clergy will meet conjointly with theoretical and practicing psychiatrists with as much mutual respect and profit as today is enjoyed by meetings of organically-minded psychiatrists with biochemists. Of course, it is dangerous to pin predictions to names. I would not deny the equivalent prophecy that the "psyche-iatrists" will converge toward the religious function of treating the human soul in its total dimensions and ecological situation, involving more community prophylaxis as well as group therapy, and thus become indistinguishable from the prophets and priests of a full-fledged religion that is integrated with the sciences. But in this case psychiatrists would be broadened from what they are today in their conceptual scheme and practice, just as the scientifically-adapted clergy would be modernized from what they are today in their conceptual scheme and practice.
References 9. Von Weizs/icker, C. F., The Relevance of Science. New York, Harper & Row, ~964, P. ~63. a. Braceland, Francis J., "Dialogue-Contribution of Medicine and Theology to the Health of Man," Pastoral Psychology, z967, I8, 8-~7. 3. Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, February, z968. 4. Rogers, Edward S., "Public Health Asks of Sociology .... " Science, ~968, z59, 5o6-o8. 5. McCann, Richard V., The Churches and Mental Health. New York, Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, ~96a, p. z95. 6. Williams, Daniel Day, "Priests, Prophets, and the Establishment," Zygon, ]ournal of Religion and Science, z967, 2, cf. pp. 322-323. 7. Yolles, Stanley F., "'The Role of Religion in the Mental Health Program," ]ournal of Religion and Health, z965, 4, 3oz-3o8.
226
Journal of Religion and Health
8. Frank, L. K., Society as the Patient. New Brunswick, N. J., Rutgers University Press, I948. The book contains papers from earlier years on the subject. 9. Mowrer, O. H., The Crisis in Psychiatry and Religion. Princeton, Van Nostrand, 7L96I. IO. Freud, S., Civilization and Its Discontents. New York, W. W. Norton Co., I96I. II. Murray, Henry Alexander, Phi Beta Kappa address at Harvard in I959; published in part as "A Mythology for Grownups" in Saturday Review, January 23, I96o; and as "Beyond Yesterday's Idealisms," in Crane Brinton, ed., The Fate of Man. New York, George Braziller, I96I, pp. II-18. za. Spiro, Melford E., "Religion and the Irrational." In Proceedings of the :~964 Annual Spring Meeting of the American Ethnological Society. Seattle, University of Washington Press, I964, pp. Io2-I15.
215
Bridging the Gap between Psychiatry and Theology
RALPH WENDELL BURHOE Both religion and psychiatry are engaged in saving souls. "Psychiatry" comes from two Greek words meaning soul and saving. And, if, as we should to be realistic, we go below the level of verbal correlations to actual histories of religion and psychiatry and examine what their operations seem to be aimed at, we find much overlap in goals: to prevent or to heal a broad range of debilitating disturbances of personal behavior commonly involving emotional distress and relations to other persons. However, psychiatry during the past century seems to represent another element of the art of healing man that has seceded from adherence within the "spiritualist" ideology and gone over to the "materialist" ideology, even though in some of the schools of psychiatry the hypothetical entities, such as "id" or "superego," have not always been much more dearly substantiated as observable entities than have gods or evil spirits. In any case, psychiatry has tried to become scientific in its understanding and treatment of emotional and behavioral disorders. As such its ideology and the rituals or practices it prescribes have separated themselves from the theological models and religious practices for healing the soul. Moreover, psychiatry has commonly been looked on by the church as more of a heresy than has general medicine, partly because the tatter's separation was largely accomplished a long time ago, but also because the former purports in some sense to save souls. In spite of the admitted disjunction or heresy of psychiatry from theology, their community of goals in healing souls has tended to foster some relationship, particularly at the level of practice. Beginning in United States Protestantism some A paper delivered at the March 6, 5968, meeting of the Chicago Branch of the Academy of Religion and Mental Health.
216
lournaI of Religion and Health
four decades ago, touched off in large measure by the efforts of that disturbed soul, Anton T. Boisen, a movement to embrace psychiatry in theological education has now reached the point where more than two hundred Protestant seminaries have programs in dinical pastoral training, and there are over three hundred related programs altogether. There are numerous societies---local, regional, or national--including the Academy of Religion and Mental Health. There are a few journals devoted primarily (and many partially) to this interrelation of psychiatry and religion, and there is an endless stream of books. But, for understandable reasons, most of this activity is directed at a co-operation in practice more than to a common theory for saving souls. Although there is some apologetic interpretation by a few theologians and an occasional psychiatrist, there is within the movement seldom any direct confrontation at the theoretical level between the fundamentals of theology and psychiatry. The critical test of the value of any real integration at the theoretical level would be the involvement of theologians and theological doctrine in medical schools, along with biochemists and biochemistry, t ~ instruct in the art of healing souls. This test is flunked. The disjunction at the theoretical level is repressed to allow the continuation of the practical co-operation and mutual benefits of the two professional groups. Outside the co-operative movement, of course, one can find open attacks and expressions of full disdain of the other party at the theoretical level. But inside the cooperative movement there is a strong inhibition both by suppression as well as by repression--of the underlying conflict between theological and psychiatric doctrines of man and the world. I have been sufficiently intimate and neutral with people great and small in both professions to have some confidence in saying something that I seldom find fully faced either in print or in the polite relations of mixed groups: Behind the surface of the polite public face of this co-operation there lies a considerable constellation of dislike, disdain, distrust, and fear. The basic questions of this paper are: Does the suppression of the theoretical disjunction of the two institutions allow the best prognosis for long-term co-operation? Can the disparateness of theology and psychiatry at the theoretical level be bridged to the advantage of both? Let me represent my version of the situation between these two titans, theology and psychiatry, in the hyperbolic metaphor of a story of the gods.
Psychiatry and Theology
217
Psychiatry is the reputed bastard son of Queen Mother Judaeo-Christian Religion, and his oedipal urges now lead him to attempt to cajole minor services out of his mother. He seduces and dominates her with his sly, indirect confirmations of the widespread rumor that her husband, God, is dead and irrelevant, and that he, Psychiatry, is now king of her realm of saving souls. Her belief in, and faithfulness to, her former spouse have been truly shaken, and she is slowly warming up to Psychiatry because her instincts tell her that his aim to save souls is a common cause with hers. Concurrently, in the lower realm of individual men, her priests have been increasingly serving as lackeys to the new king while quietly suppressing their former association with the now defamed Christ, or outrightly dedaring in the hospital corridors that they never knew him, that God is dead, and long live Psychiatry and the secular gods ! In truth, however, the rumor that the sovereign Lord of All Life is dead is false. Queen Mother Religion has only been blinded by a combination of her own narcissism and the baffling, bright, new lights of her children the Sciences to the point where she can no longer see her Lord clearly, if at all. Her children, the Sdences, induding Psychiatry, cannot see their father because they cannot see beyond the ends of their noses, a peculiar myopic malady that comes from keeping their noses too close to their grindstones. Meanwhile, the whole integrity of the realm of the gods is being threatened by a revolution of some sons of the Sciences, born out of ill-considered or illegitimate intercourse of the Sciences with various seductive sirens of the arts of government, commerce, communications, industry, and the military. These rapacious grandchildren, some of whom have never heard of their grandfather, the Lord of the Cosmos, and others of whom readily believe the rumors that the Lord is dead, naturally do not believe that a nonexistent Lord imposes any necessary order in the realm of life. And this unruly mob of bastard sons and daughters of the arts and sciences--induding such characters as T.V. Radio, Vaginal Coil, Atom Weapon, Jet Transport, Automation, Cybernetic Machinery, and Declining Deathrate-have without rhyme or reason taken into their hands the world's several separate warp strands of pre-existing cultures, which were more or less integrated when they were separate, and hurled through them in disorderly array these multicolored technological woof strands to make such a confusing two-dimensional pattern of mismatched, unravelling, and broken threads, that in the twentieth century the men of the world are going crazy in disorientation and disorganization.
218
Journal of Religion and Health
The god Psychiatry in his nose-long myopia knows little or nothing about what his scientific brothers have been cooking up in their laboratories of the Multidiversity, or what crazy distortions of psyches will be produced by his unruly nephews and nieces who are simultaneously interweaving and breaking cultural patterns in an unholy mess. It looks doubtful that he is big enough to be king of the realm of mental health in the disorderly world that they have brought about. Queen Mother Religion in her blindness sees little of the implications of research in Multidiversity, although she hears with sorrowful heart the cries of the afflicted in the disordered world brought into being by her grandchildren. However, so long as her eyes cannot adapt themselves to seeing her lost husband in the suddenly bright illumination of reality made by her scientific sons, she is impotent to help. No release from the impending catastrophic collapse of order and life in the world seems likely unless the Queen Mother or one of her daughters can learn to see more dearly and interpret again more effectively the whole, sovereign reality on whose laws all life depends. There is the Herculean double task of bringing not only the multiracial, multinational, and multicultural gods of the various peoples of the world under the order and law of one sovereign God, but there is the equally difficult task of bringing the various gods of the woof strands of Multidiversity under the same sovereign. Only then can the true and necessary order for world society of men in an age of science be achieved. Only then could Prince Psychiatry effectively co-operate with his Queen Mother in the salvation of souls with full respect for her authority, and only then could the Queen Mother have full confidence that her son Psychiatry could play a proper and effective role in this task. I wish to suggest some brief documentation of this tale of the gods. That the sciences generally are children of the Judaeo-Christian culture is immediately apparent from the cirde out of which they were conceived and born, primarily within a circle of less than a thousand-mile radius from Basel, Switzerland, during the past few centuries when Queen Mother Christendom had reached her maturity there. The physicist C. F. von Weizs~cker, among others, has traced the birth of the sciences more deeply in terms of ideas and attitudes into the womb of Christendom. He says: "I called modern science a legacy, I might have said a child, of Christianity.''1 The birth of Psychiatry during the past century from this same womb has been described recently by Francis Braceland.s That Psychiatry is
Psychiatry and Theology
219
reputedly a bastard stems from the general notions, including those of Braceland, that medicine and the sciences generally are offspring of pre-Christian Greek "science." But the question of bastardy is in my opinion doubtful if one takes into account an understanding of the essential identity of the Greek and Judaic notions of the One, Eternal, Sovereign God united in Christian theology. However, that in the minds of psychiatrists and the educated public the programs in mental health derive their basic theory from doctrines that are at variance with Christian theology is widely documented and expressed in practice. Freud's Future of an Iltusion is symbolic. I have all my life, as a layman in both religion and psychiatry, observed that when the psychiatrist calls upon the clergyman for help, it is not usually a consultation for expert advice on how theology can contribute to the patient's therapy. The clergyman may perform various useful chores, although there is always the fear that the clergyman's religious beliefs may get in the way and spoil the "scientific" rituals of medicine. Even when mental health professionals look beyond their usual frames of reference of spotting some trouble in the internal somatic or psychic machinery and begin to see etiology and therapy as involving society, and even philosophy or some holistic view of man and the world, as some of them are increasingly doing, any role for the church seems to be largely bypassed, and if mentioned it is given a subsidiary role. In a recent discussion of "The Prospects of Psychiatry" before the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Seymour S. Kety and John P. Spiegel talked about biochemistry and community mental health projects, and Spiegel noted that "the framework of a determined social therapy must rest on the development of an integrated theory of human behavior, a theory which has not yet been devised"; but they did not mention Christian theology's doctrine of God or man, or even an important role for the church.8 Edward S. Rogers, of the School of Public Health at the University of California at Berkeley, presents another argument to the effect that tracing the etiology or effecting a cure calls for a much greater scope than is customarily given in public health, and he suggests that the health sciences cannot resolve their problems without involving and understanding "the determining role of human values": "It is' necessary to know why, and in relation to what, health is valued.''4 He considers calling for help from the moral philosophers, but not from the theologians. However, he dismisses even the philosophers because he does not expect any adequate answers from them soon enough;
220
Journal of Religion and Health
and, "to provide a rational answer to questions of such magnitude," he calls for a scientific approach to "some master conceptualization of the nature of human goals and the various alternative ways of attaining them," a "holistic ecological concept of human organization." But no mention is made of theology or the church. Even where programs of co-operation between psychiatry and religion are set up in the highest hopes and most polite terms, we inevitably find the same expression of faith in the relevance of psychiatric doctrine and the bypassing or dismissal of theological doctrine as possibly a nuisance or even dangerous for the proper healing of souls. The original ~959 brochure for the famous Menninger Foundation "Program in Religion and Psychiatry" states on page 4: In the context of the Foundation's purposes, there are two senses in which religion... may be considered a "related discipline" to psychiatry. First, representatives of religious institutions may improve the human relations aspect of their work by learning certain things from psychiatry. Second, psychiatrists.., may more effectively aid some people if they grasp the significance of certain religious factors in their lives. I take "their lives" to refer not to "psychiatrists" but to "some people," since this way the sentence makes much more sense in context. But note the one-way-street character here, as in almost any place you look, of the relationship of religion and psychiatry: religion appears as a symptom to be understood, not as an agent in producing-mental health. I do not yet know of any medical school that imports theologians to inform psychiatrists about how to save souls. Even among the clergy, the inferiority or irrelevance of theology or religion for mental health is publicly as well as privately recognized. Richard V. McCann's study of The Churches and Mental Health states: From our survey [of a national sample of clergymen] a picture emerges not of clergymen with serene confidence in religion, in the church, in themselves when confronted with mental health problems, but rather of men in a dilemma: considerable ambivalence about the efficacy of religious resources, and at the same time reservations and anxiety about referring parishioners to psychiatrists and other professional resources,s What is more, theologians as well as secular historians and social analysts are saying that psychiatry has become a kind of religion with prophetic and priestly functions. I cite as an example theologian Daniel Day Williams: One could make a strong case that the major role of psychiatry (I use the term in a broad
Psychiatry and Theology
221
sense) is priestly. There is the mediation of a healing reality to people who are anxious and hurt. There is the penetration to the deeper levels of guilt, estrangement, and loneliness. There is the offer of release and new freedom. The mode of ministry is personal, caring, and patient. There is the confessional, and a form of absolution based on discovery of the roots of guilt feelings. And there is the hope of a life released for love, and coping with the problems of existence. It is more difficult to make a case for psychiatry's fulfillment of the role of providing a structure for belief. . . . But the prophet role is present also. Sigmund Freud surely has prophetic stature in the attack on the mind-set of Victorian society, his discovery of a new world of forces and structures in the person, and his critique of religion and civilization.6 Possibly care for the health of the soul, prophylactic as well as therapeutic, will in the next few decades be transferred from the churches to the new Community Health Centers, of which some five or six hundred are expected to be in operation by ~97o, according to Stanley F. Yolles, Director of the National Institute of Mental Healthy Such Community Health Centers begin to look like churches, except that their "theology" comes from psychiatry. These few examples seem to be from an almost inexhaustible literature that predominantly indicates that Queen Mother Religion is gradually yielding to the regnancy of her son Psychiatry in the realm of the cure of souls. While clergy increasingly study or even preach from prophet Freud and other prophets of psychiatry, what are the evidences of reciprocal private or formal study by psychiatrists of theological doctrines to supplement those from biochemistry, behaviorism, or Freud? But I have thus far been suggesting some documentation of only the first part of my myth of the gods in mental health, the aspirations of Prince Psychiatry to regnancy while Queen Mother Religion is declining in power. I think we can document the rest of it, too. However, the second stage of the myth, the handwriting on the wall of the world of Muhidiversity into which the gods have thrown us, proclaiming an anarchy and imminent doom if some order is not provided to integrate the various pre-existing cultures and new technological compartmentalizations, is plain for all to see. I cannot take time here to justify these signs of our tribulations. The quotations from Spiegel and Rogers on the need, felt in the scientific mental health profession itself, to include the whole picture of human values in its larger eco-
222
Journal of Religion and Health
logical setting is evidence that Psychiatry as it now stands is not capable of the over-all task of human salvation. Lawrence K. Frank about three decades ago led the way to the notion that perhaps it was society, not the individual, that was sick.s The Yolles paper cited is typical of many that point out the prophylactic if not therapeutic values of religion for the health of both society and the individual, although the author does not, of course, tell us how religion with a dead God or failure of belief can be effective. The psychologist O. H. Mowrer, whose relevance is somewhat prediscounted in some psychiatric cirdes, has challenged the efficacy of the Freudian type of psychiatry and condemns Christianity for giving up its doctrines of sin, repentance, and restitution. 9 He is not alone in this protest. Many inside and outside psychiatry proper acknowledge that psychiatry is not at present adequately equipped to engage in the therapy of the sick society, to say nothing of dealing with the problem of man's hope and purpose in the total world. Even Freud acknowledged that "Only religion is able to answer the question of the purpose of life. m~ My own grounds for the prophecy in the final part of the story of the contemporary gods, the prophecy of the restoration of Theology as Queen of the Sciences to take a central role in the cure or care of souls, are perhaps too complex for this paper. The evidence of the coming of the much-needed water of life is as yet only a small cloud on the horizon. Some of the evidence may be implicit in the establishment of the Center for Advanced Study in Theology and the Sciences under the Meadville Theological School in Chicago in i964, and in ~966 the publication of Zygon, Journal of Re-
ligion and Science. The Center's function has been described as one "to examine and reinterpret man's religious and moral heritage in the light of the new understandings of the world and human nature engendered by the sciences." This year one post-doctoral Fellow at the Center is an East-Coast Protestant theologian and another is a WestCoast biochemist with no formal church affiliation at present. They are working creatively together on such problems as examining the validity of the efforts of the Jesuit Father Teilhard de Chardin to be faith~l to both theology and the theory of evolution, and seeing if perchance they can themselves provide some scientificallygrounded illumination of man's religious problems. Zygon is cosponsored by the Meadville Theological School and the Institute on
Psychiatry and Theology
223
Religion in an Age of Science. The latter was established in i954 as an independent society of scientific and religious professionals and laymen who "felt that, when a new 'theology' for the ages dawns, it will be only after the scientific world view is incorporated in it." Since ~954 IRAS has held each summer a week-long national conference in this effort, as well as numerous more limited meetings. Of interest to those concerned with religion and mental health is the following quotation from Zygon's first editorial (March "r : To conserve the subtle values that still remain valid heritages from a long historical experience and yet to meet the conditions of a new age, we suggest that the problem of religious reform is essentially akin to that of the reform of medicine, which is a cultural institution closely tied to religion in human history. In both institutions we see a long history of wisdom from the past fusing with newer wisdom, and one does not see this evolution as being brought about by brash reforms that throw out all that is old because of some corrective new insights. In both medicine and religion we see sacred values and wisdom implicit in the prescientific accumulations of cultural wisdom as still valid and essential . . . . And for religion as for medicine, we see the new revelations of the sciences as a boon for better theory and practice to meet the requirements of life in a new age. . . . . We recognize that the ultimate judgment and selection of human beliefs and behaviors are made, not by the wisdom or foolishness of men, but by historical forces that far transcend our puny wisdom fully to comprehend. The dozens of papers by scientists and theologians that have thus far appeared in Zygon may have some implications for the possibility of what Henry Alexander Murray calls a "Mythology for Grownups," a new bible, or a new "world testament. ''n We look toward a theology that may integrate with contemporary world views, one that also embodies the broad wisdom of the great religious traditions and is not limited to the incomplete fragments of life's values characteristic of some of the recent psychosocial or political programs of human salvation. It Seems to me that related evidence is inherent in the quotation above from Edward Rogers: that scientific approaches to health require ultimately "some master conceptualization of the nature of human goals," some "holistic ecological concept of human organization." This, I venture to suggest, is another way of calling for a theology. Scientists, including psychiatrists, in contemplating the elements involved in mental health, are being forced to look beyond the skull and gonads to the social structures of world society and ultimately to the total ecology of man.
224
]ournat of Religion and Health
This begins to look like a convergence toward the ground of being, toward the ultimate reality that creates and sustains our lives. For the sciences, as for the traditional religions, man is ultimately dependent upon a world he did not make, a world that made him, a world from the inevitable judgment of whose laws and overarching realities he has no escape. He must either adapt or cease to be. In theological language this is akin to man's duty and privilege to trust in his creator and sustainer and forever to seek to know his law and live accordingly. Traditionally religion and its theoretical concepts (theology) have had this broad, holistic, ecological, even cosmic perspective on what is wise and healthy for man's ultimate concerns, although it naturally has been expressed in the world views of the surrounding cultures. I would point out the observation of the anthropologist Melford E. Spiro, among others, that primitive religious "myths" or beliefs at their time of origin and ascendency are (in spite of a widespread notion to the contrary) never far from being integrated with the generally accepted knowledge or science of their times and places. TM This desire for justification relative to the currently held world views extends to and is manifest in the higher religions, like Christianity, although Christianity had a hard time adapting to the Greek world view, and although since the birth of the modern sciences we are living in a time of unprecedentedly rapid innovation in our pictures of reality to which our theologians have not very adequately adapted. The medical theorists and practitioners themselves have not always kept au courant with the sciences. I do not doubt that theologians will soon be able to relate the new scientific knowledge to the basic import of major religious doctrines or theories of the JudaeoChristian tradition, which the Queen of the Sciences in the past so successfully adapted to the older world views of the Mediterranean basin. I suspect that many of the critical doctrines of the Christian church and also of other major religions, when properly translated into the languages of the new sciences, will be confirmed and extended rather than lost in the process. Some doctrines and practices will no doubt be revised rather radically to new and more effective patterns, as have been many in medicine, and no one will be either sorry for the losses or less appreciative of the ancient wisdom that will be revitalized for our contemporary prophylaxis and therapy of human souls. Psychiatry will continue, I suggest, but as an integrated section of a much
Psychiatry and Theology
225
broader, more social, and more cosmic theological conceptual system for man's adaptation of his internal nature to the total social and cosmic reality in which he lives and has his being. Actually, the anticipated integration of theology with the sciences may become, I suggest, a prior source for reducing some of the confusion of doctrines found today within the psychiatric profession, even before the several psychiatric schools themselves are able to accomplish this integration. I prophesy that within very few decades the potentialities and pressures in process today will bring us to the point where a scientifically-integrated species of theologians and practicing clergy will meet conjointly with theoretical and practicing psychiatrists with as much mutual respect and profit as today is enjoyed by meetings of organically-minded psychiatrists with biochemists. Of course, it is dangerous to pin predictions to names. I would not deny the equivalent prophecy that the "psyche-iatrists" will converge toward the religious function of treating the human soul in its total dimensions and ecological situation, involving more community prophylaxis as well as group therapy, and thus become indistinguishable from the prophets and priests of a full-fledged religion that is integrated with the sciences. But in this case psychiatrists would be broadened from what they are today in their conceptual scheme and practice, just as the scientifically-adapted clergy would be modernized from what they are today in their conceptual scheme and practice.
References 9. Von Weizs/icker, C. F., The Relevance of Science. New York, Harper & Row, ~964, P. ~63. a. Braceland, Francis J., "Dialogue-Contribution of Medicine and Theology to the Health of Man," Pastoral Psychology, z967, I8, 8-~7. 3. Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, February, z968. 4. Rogers, Edward S., "Public Health Asks of Sociology .... " Science, ~968, z59, 5o6-o8. 5. McCann, Richard V., The Churches and Mental Health. New York, Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, ~96a, p. z95. 6. Williams, Daniel Day, "Priests, Prophets, and the Establishment," Zygon, ]ournal of Religion and Science, z967, 2, cf. pp. 322-323. 7. Yolles, Stanley F., "'The Role of Religion in the Mental Health Program," ]ournal of Religion and Health, z965, 4, 3oz-3o8.
226
Journal of Religion and Health
8. Frank, L. K., Society as the Patient. New Brunswick, N. J., Rutgers University Press, I948. The book contains papers from earlier years on the subject. 9. Mowrer, O. H., The Crisis in Psychiatry and Religion. Princeton, Van Nostrand, 7L96I. IO. Freud, S., Civilization and Its Discontents. New York, W. W. Norton Co., I96I. II. Murray, Henry Alexander, Phi Beta Kappa address at Harvard in I959; published in part as "A Mythology for Grownups" in Saturday Review, January 23, I96o; and as "Beyond Yesterday's Idealisms," in Crane Brinton, ed., The Fate of Man. New York, George Braziller, I96I, pp. II-18. za. Spiro, Melford E., "Religion and the Irrational." In Proceedings of the :~964 Annual Spring Meeting of the American Ethnological Society. Seattle, University of Washington Press, I964, pp. Io2-I15.
