Psychology I.

I did graduate work in counselling psychology--and event worked in that field for a couple of years--before eventually going back to university to pick up my teaching diploma.

Of course I gathered a number of useful insights during my "psychology period," but I remained largely unconvinced (one might say unconverted) by most of what I heard an saw. My dominant recollection is of how fundamental were my differences with the underlying philosophy the assumptions about the meaning and purpose of human life and human happiness--that kept insinuating its way into the classes I took and the counselling sessions I observed.

In a nutshell, psychological counselling aims to improve the quality of a person's life by helping people focus on heir own needs and then helping them find ways of satisfying those needs.

Not exactly an overriding preoccupation in the life of Mother Teresa or the saints you might say--or, for that matter, not an orientation classical philosophers like Plato and Aristotle were anxious to promote.

Traditional religious wisdom urges concern for others and promotes values of self-sacrifice and self-denial, of duty a d responsibility, all within a loving relationship with God and our neighbour. Much of the thinking of modern psychology pushes in a very different direction.

As Paul Vitz, Professor of Psychology at New York University, explains it, psychologists "inevitably promote selfishnes by asking us to realize ourselves, to love ourselves, to view e environment as a means for our own self-actualizing ends, and to consider whether something will contribute to our own development as the only real criterion for what we should do."

Without intending to, much of modern psychology actively sanctions selfishness by opposing prescriptions and by encouraging people to aim fundamentally at their own development and fulfillment. This was certainly my sense of things during my psychology years.

There was not even a suggestion, in any of the psychology texts we read or discussions we had in class, that the cultivation of virtuous habits was in any way related to human happiness. Words like "self-denial" and "self sacrifice" never appeared.

Yet "the problems and troubles that lead people to seek psychotherapy may derive less than is commonly supposed from not expressing themselves, fulfilling themselves, or satisfying needs directed toward themselves than from not having a workable way of living in which they participate in and contribute to matters they care about beyond themselves" (Sollod).

The bottom line is that the dominant concern of modern psychology with "self-fulfillment", "self-actualization", has no relation to how Jesus lived, or how he instructed His followers to live.

Christ commanded us, "Deny yourself, take up your cross and follow me"; he did not command us to busy ourselves identifying and fulfilling our personal needs and wants. For the Christian, "the self is the problem, not the potential paradise," as Paul Vitz has observed.

Psychologists themselves haven't been completely blind to the rotten fruit that's resulted from what Paul Vitz has aptly described as their "cult of self-worship". Donald Campbell, a past president of the American Psychological Association, argued some years back that contemporary North American society is now full of "under-inhibited, overly narcissistic, and overly selfish individuals," for which he believes psychology must take considerable blame.

Vitz and Campbell are in fundamental agreement that psychology's emphasis on the self and its fulfillment has helped promote a view of life that now leads many to see shallow, personal, ego fulfillment as an end in itself-the very meaning of their lives.

There is a great deal more to say about all this of course and I believe it's important enough to spend the next few "Update Notes" discussing the question of psychology and Christian faith. I became quite captured by this whole problem during my time at university and even ended up writing my master's thesis on the topic "Anti-Religious Bias in Psychotherapy: Implications and Challenges", 1988.

But why all this talk about psychology by someone whose intellectual interests and professional involvements are now all focused on Catholic education?

The simple justification is that the influence of psychology on the field of education has become pervasive. Many reasonably sounding but ultimately shallow and wrongheaded notions have been smuggled into modern educational theory and practice under the cloak of modern psychology--ideas for which there has been little or no field-tested empirical validation.

Consider this article, then, a preamble to a larger discussion of the influence of psychology on education.

If you happen to need counselling or psychotherapy, you should know there is a growing number of excellent Catholic counselors and psychologists out there, people who have done the hard work of sifting out the sound principles from the rest.

If you are thinking of a career in psychology, you should have a look at The Institute for the Psychological Sciences in Arlington Virginia (http://www.ipsciences.edu/index2.html). IPS provides a first-rate training in psychology from a Catholic understanding. It is hands down, I would think, the best place for Catholics to study Clinical Psychology in North America.

J. Fraser Field is Executive Officer of the Catholic Educator's Resource Centre, Powell River, BC, (www.catholiceducation.org)