Psychiatry and Religion

Psychiatrists and clergymen, meeting over the ailing psyche of modern man, still eye one another suspiciously. Rare is the churchman who makes systematic use of psychiatric techniques in his ministry to souls; rare is the analyst who lives and works upon specific premises of religious faith. One exception is Karl Menninger of the famed Menninger psychiatric clinic in Topeka, Kans. (TiME, Oct. 25, 1948). Busy Dr. Menninger practices Presbyterianism as well as Freud, sees no irreconcilable conflict between the two; in the current issue of the Chicago Theological Seminary Register he explains how these practices parallel:

Religious behavior, says Psychiatrist Menninger, can be divided into "behavior with reference to fellow-creatures" (morals), and "behavior with reference to God" (worship). Does Dr. Menninger believe in prayer? "I could not make a conscientious answer," he replies, "without stipulating that the question be resolved into various parts.

"If I were asked, 'Do you believe that prayer exists?' I could answer easily, 'Yes' --for me, and for many others. If I were then asked, 'Do you believe that the prayers of men are heard by God?' I could answer in the affirmative because my conception of God is such that everything reaches Him. If I were asked, 'Do you believe that God answers prayers?' . . . my affirmative answer would not necessarily mean that I agree with what is in the mind of the questioner."

Guilt & Sex. Dr. Menninger sees "value in group assemblages and some kind of formal ritual. As a lifelong Presbyterian, I am not a genuflector but I respect it as one of several simple maneuvers which have the same meaning of reverence . . . The mutual stimulation, reinforcement and encouragement that the individuals of a group receive from one another are well known to psychology, and the effect of a common relationship to a leader--pastor, rabbi or priest--has been carefully examined by many scientists, including Freud. Singing together has so great and obvious a value in furthering interpersonal linkages and enthusiasm in a common purpose that it is surprising that it was so long neglected by the Christian church ' and only introduced by Luther (and thereafter by Catholic authorities also)."

In the field of morals Dr. Menninger finds psychiatry on the defensive. " 'Psychiatrists are wicked men,' we are told. 'They persuade their patients to a Godless, immoral philosophy. They repudiate the conscience; they advocate irresponsible self-expression to the disregard of moral law.'"

An important reason for this position, says Menninger, is the common impression that psychiatry is down on all sense of guilt. Not so, argues Menninger. It is only false guilt--the patient's sense of sin about something he did not do--that psychoanalysis tries to remove.

Many ministers and laymen apparently assume that the Freudians are in favor of sexual promiscuity, but "this assumption is false, and its reiteration is a lie, a slander, a canard, and a misrepresentation of facts . . . Psychoanalysts do not favor promiscuity, do not encourage it, do not attempt to relieve any patient's guilt about it, and, in short, are no more to be considered immoral inciters to crime than anyone else who is doing his best to diminish the errors of mankind. Quite the reverse, most of them spend hours and hours attempting to relieve patients from the compulsive feeling of need for these very 'immoralities.'"

What the psychiatrist does try to do is simply to get people's sex lives back to normal. People cured of a crippling sense of guilt about sexual relations between husband & wife may sometimes be a bit carried away by their new freedom, "but the errors of such individuals no more indicate the sinfulness of psychoanalysis than do the sins of certain Catholics indicate the wickedness of Catholicism or the offenses of certain Protestants the failure of Christianity."

The Attitude of Love. To Menninger the practice of psychiatry is essentially a religious vocation. "Consider [the psychiatrist's] ministry of care to the most miserable, the most unloved, the most pitiable, and at times the most offensive and dangerous of human beings . . . Consider what you call his tolerance, his forbearance, his patience with stubbornness, anger, spitefulness, silliness, sulkiness, belligerency, desperateness, unreasonableness, maliciousness--all the manifestations of hate. These he meets, if he is a good psychiatrist, with an attitude he is not ashamed to call love. We can live, he tells them, if we can love.

" 'You can be angry with me if you must,' the psychiatrist tells his patients (by his behavior); 'I know you have had good cause to be angry at some one, so angry you became afraid of it. But you need not be afraid here--not afraid of me, not afraid of your own anger, or of your own self-punishing conscience . . . For I'm not angry, and I won't get angry, and after a while you won't be angry, either. These people all about you whom you can't look at now--you'll find that they are your friends. We are all your friends. We all love you, in spite of the unlovableness you feel. Presently you will begin to realize that, and relax a little . . . And as you come to understand us better, and we you, the warmth of love will begin to replace your present anguish and you will find yourself helping us and getting well!'

"This is what the psychiatrist must say in every gesture, every act, every order, every word . . . Does it sound ungodly? And if it is misunderstood and criticized as wasteful, or as immorally permissive, the psychiatrist may comfort himself with the example of One who said, 'Neither do I condemn thee . . .'"

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