Freud and the Holy Father.

Part 1

The tragedy of the nineteenth century, observed Pope Pius XI, was that, in the wake of the industrial revolution, the Church lost the working classes.

The tragedy of the twentieth, warned Catholic psychiatrist Karl Stern, may be that the Church has lost the struggle for man's soul in the wake of the revolution wrought by Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis. "Our image of the 'interior world' will never be the same as it was before the year 1894," Stern wrote in The Third Revolution: Psychiatry and Religion.

That interior world can resemble an inferno, particularly in this age so beset by existential doubt. "We're the middle children of history, man-no purpose or place," remarks a character in the movie Fight Club. "We have no Great War, no Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives."

Stern believed that most people "of this present civilization" are afflicted by neurotic suffering. They "live in mortal anxiety, or they are unable to hope, or they are entangled in mysterious hatred, they are out to destroy that which would give them happiness, they are incapable of trusting, or they are being oppressed by something which is best called insatiable remorse."

Faced with such anguish, Christians could not ignore the "third revolution" which followed the Marxist and eugenic upheavals, wrote Stern. "The area of the Gospel has been a frontier area. The Christian life is a life of challenge and response, even in the world of ideas." Yet Christians could be understandably wary: "To the uninitiated, Freud's papers on psychology read for the most part like straight pornography, his pamphlets on religion represent sheer atheism."

Moreover, in a startlingly brief period of time, Freud's flawed anthropology formed a potent brew with current false notions. Science, overstepping its natural authority, rushed in to fill the "philosophical vacuum" created by secularism. Disciplines "methodologically" unrelated (psychoanalysis and behaviourism, anthropology and psychology, psychiatry and sociology) were "held together by a common philosophical basis," forming "a sort of Corpus Non-Mysticum" which had "the unifying power of faith." This hybrid philosophy was "vulgarized" in short order, permeating society with its perverse vision of man.

Psychoanalysis was "so strongly embedded in all this" that its basic feature--"the art of the healing dialogue"--became unrecognizable. Christians were tempted to reject it along with the philosophical errors of which it seemed to be a part and to disbelieve Freud's assertion that the technique, "purely isolated as a therapeutic method, is philosophically neutral."

This issue is close to the heart of the matter. The therapeutic value of psychoanalysis lies in "the unique encounter, the meeting of two human beings, with all the re-enactment of a forgotten drama, the re-presentation of that which is 'familiar' (of the family)... But the spirit is part of this. The philosophical setting of such a relationship does not have to be formulated to be there. The spirit of the psychoanalyst or, as it happens in many cases, his denial of the spirit comes in.

Fifty years later, Dr. Phillip Mango echoes this thought. As one of the founders of St. Michael's Institute for the Psychological Sciences in New York, he repudiates the notion that there is a fundamental conflict between psychology and religion.

The problem, generally speaking, is the practitioner. If he or she is "pro-abortion, pro-lesbian, pro-masturbation, pro-pornography, or oriented towards selfishness and blocks out the spiritual, then the patient naturally says, 'Well, psychology is full of baloney.' No."

Dr. Mango has been director of SMI for 17 of the 30 years he has been practicing as a licensed psychotherapist. An international alliance of Catholic mental health professionals, the Institute seeks to integrate authentic discoveries in medicine, psychiatry and psychology with Catholicism. The latter cannot be "liberal" or "conservative distortions of the Pope" but a faith that is "totally loyal to Pope John Paul II."

The Holy Father, whose radical thought has yet to be fully appreciated, "deeply welcomes" true findings in psychiatry and psychology, says Mango. "In fact, I could not heal anybody from depression, anxiety, panic attacks, psychosexual problems, lesbianism, homosexuality, eating disorders, if I did not know the science of psychology...Christ made the whole person. He made the psyche."

To be continued. Those who wish to find out more about St. Michael's Institute in the meantime can go to www.saintmichael.net on the internet.

Lianne Laurence lives in Toronto. Her biography of Joseph Borowski will be published in the fall.