The Psychological Method vs. Christianity - Part 5

Aside from the various previous citations in reference to individual religious beliefs and religious connotations of their teachings, here I will demonstrate the various ways in which the psych field is indeed seen as some type of religion.  Vitz bluntly states, “contemporary psychology is a form of secular humanism based on the rejection of God and the worship of self.”  He also states, "In many respects, all modern psychology of whatever theoretical persuasion, because of the emphasis on special, somewhat esoteric knowledge, can be interpreted as part of a vast gnostic heresy."   

Torrey tells us that, “The similarities of Freudian theory and therapy to a religion have been noted and commented upon from its earliest inception in Vienna. . . . .  Freud offered an understanding of the unknown, an explanation for evil, and in later years. . . even a myth of creation.”  Meanwhile, Hunt quotes psychologists who have “described psychotherapy as a kind of national religion, with a gospel of self-fulfillment and with therapists as the new priests”.  The Bobgans cite psychiatrist Thomas S. Szasz, Professor Emeritus of State University of New York, as saying, “. . . the human relations we now call ‘psychotherapy’ are, in fact, matters of religion - and that we mislabel them as ‘therapeutic’ at great risk to our spiritual well-being.”

Jung essentially felt that God was in everyone with a collective unconscious.  His “goal for psychoanalysis was to be an all-encompassing religion superior to Christianity,” and the Bobgans cite a letter Jung wrote to Freud as follows:  “I imagine a far finer and more comprehensive task for [psychoanalysis] than alliance with an ethical fraternity.  I think we must give it time to infiltrate into people from many centers, to revivify among intellectuals a feeling for symbol and myth, ever so gently to transform Christ back into the soothsaying god of the vine, which he was, and in this way absorb those ecstatic instinctual forces of Christianity for the one purpose of making the cult and the sacred myth what they once were - a drunken feast of joy where man regained the ethos and holiness of an animal.”

The Bobgans also cite Maslow: “These psychologies give promise of developing into the life-philosophy, the religion-surrogate, the value-system, the life-program that these people have been missing.  Without the transcendent and the transpersonal, we get sick, violent, and nihilistic, or else hopeless and apathetic.  We need something ‘bigger than we are’ to be awed by and to commit ourselves to in a new, naturalistic, empirical, non-churchy sense, perhaps as Thoreau and Whitman, William James and John Dewey did.”

Dave Hunt cites an article from Psychology Today where Rollo May says, “We have bid goodbye to the theologians at the wake for our dead God.”  He also cites a 1969 article from the same magazine that says we must “face our own inner experiences without the guidance of traditional. . . foundation stones of Judeo-Christian experience. . . . We are compelled to erect our own morality, arrive at our own faith and belief. . . .”

Hunt also tells of the Journal of Humanistic Psychology publishing an article declaring, “From Delphi’s ‘know thyself’ through scripture’s ‘you shall be as gods!’ we are left with the certitude that we are, indeed, multidimensional beings capable of works beyond our imagining and that our primary purpose in life is to discover who we are and who we can become.”

Another citation from the Bobgans is this one from Herbert Lazarus in his book,  How to Get Your Money's Worth Out of Psychiatry:  “Psychiatry has a quarrel with only those forms of religion which emphasize the doctrine of original sin. Any belief that tends to focus on the idea that man is inherently evil conflicts with the basically humanistic approach to problems that psychiatrists must follow." 

G. Brock Chishom, onetime director of the U.N. World Health Organization and president of the World Federation for Mental Health, stated, “If the race is to be freed from its crippling burden of good and evil, it must be psychiatrists who take the original responsibility. . . .  With the other human sciences, psychiatry must now decide what is to be the immediate future of the human race.  No one else can.  And this is the prime responsibility of psychiatry.”

To sum up this section I have to agree with William Kirk Kilpatrick, Associate Professor of Educational Psychology at Boston College, who is cited by Bulkley as saying, “Psychology and religion are competing faiths.  If you seriously hold to one set of values, you will logically have to reject the other.”