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Psychology as Faith
By Robert Coles

[Editor's Note: The following essay first appeared in the June, 1984 issue of the New Oxford Review and is reprinted by permission of the New Oxford Review, 1069 Kains Avenue, Berkeley, CA 94706. It is copyright ©copyright 1984, New Oxford Review.]

AT various times in my writing I have made snide references to the secular idolatry which it has been the fate of psychology and psychiatry to become for so many of us. My wife and our sons have suggested I spell out some of my thoughts on this subject, hence this essay. I must say that I speak as one of the gullible, the susceptible, the all too readily devotional-having put in years of teaching in medicine and pediatrics, psychiatry and child psychiatry, in psychoanalysis, and done so with an eagerness and zeal and self-assurance, if not self-importance, I have yet to shake off, no matter these words, and others I'll write before I go to meet my Maker. "Once smitten, for life smitten," as a teacher of mine in high school used to say, and how we mocked his arrogant determinism, we who were so sure that no one or nothing would get its teeth into us unless we rationally and with utterly independent judgment had decided that such be the case.

In fact, I think we need to know why that teacher's observation does so commonly turn out to be true-the intellectual and psychological, and not least, social and economic "investment," so to speak, we make in what amounts to a way of thinking, as well as a career. The issue, as always, is pride, the sin of sins. To be a psychiatrist in America today, one says with all the risks of even more pride, of narcissism, is to take a substantial risk with one's spiritual future, as Anna Freud obliquely declared in one of her books, Normality and Pathology in Childhood. There she rendered a chronicle of the unblinking credulity accorded any and every psychoanalytic assumption, however tentatively posited; and as she said more bluntly to a few of us at Yale Medical School ill a meeting both instructive and unsettling during the mid-1970s: "I do not understand why so many people want us to tell them the answers to everything that happens in life! We have enough trouble figuring out the few riddles we are equipped to investigate!"

Well, of course, she did understand only too well what has happened,

Robert Coles is Professor of Psychiatry and Medical Humanities at Harvard University. His many publications include Children of Crisis (1967), The Mind's Fate (1975), and Women of Crisis: Lives of Work and Dreams (1980). He delivered the 1984 Stone Lectures at Princeton Theological Seminary

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especially in America; the mind as a constant preoccupation for many people who are basically agnostic, and who regard themselves as the ultimate, if passing, reality-which preoccupation constitutes a socially and historically conditioned boost to the egoism or narcissism we all must confront in ourselves. The result is everywhere apparent: parents who don't dare bring up their children, from infancy on, without recourse to one expert's book, then another's; students who are mesmerized by talk of psychological "stages" and "phases" and "behavioral patterns" and "complexes"; grown-up people who constantly talk of an "identity crisis" or a "mid-life crisis"; elderly men and women who worry about "the emotional aspects of old age," and those attending them at home or in the hospital who aim at becoming versed in steering the "dying" through their "stages" or "phases"; newspaper columnists, if not gurus, and their counterparts on television who have something to say about every single human predicament-the bottom line being, always, a consultation with a "therapist"; and worst of all, the everyday language of our given culture, saturated with psychological expressions, if not banalities, to the point that a Woody Allen movie strikes one not as exaggeration, caricature, or satire, but as documentary realism.

Especially sad and disedifying is the preoccupation of all too many clergy with the dubious blandishments of contemporary psychology and psychiatry. I do not mean to say there is no value in understanding what psychoanalytic studies, and others done in this century by medical and psychological investigators, have to offer any of us who spend time with our fellow human beings-in the home, in school, at work, and, certainly, in the various places visited by ministers and priests. The issue is the further step not a few of today's clergy have taken-whereby "pastoral counseling," for instance, becomes their major ideological absorption and the use of the language of psychology their major source of self-satisfaction. Surely we are in danger of losing our religious faith when the chief satisfaction of our lives consists of an endless attribution of psychological nomenclature to all who happen to come our way.

I am tired, for instance, of the unwarranted, undeserved acquiescence some ministers (and alas, recently, priests as well) show to various "experts" who tell them about important "relationships" (talking about psychological jargon) and about "mental health" (whatever that is) and about the supposed "value" of religion (the height of condescension) in a person's so-called "psychic economy." I am tired of watching ministers or priests mouth psychiatric pieties, when "hard praying" (as I used to hear it put in the rural South) is what the particular human being may want, and, yes, urgently require. I am tired of all the "value-free" declarations in the name of what is called "social science"; tired, too, of the complexities, ambiguities, and paradoxes of our moral life being swept into yet another "developmental scheme," with "stages" geared to ages.

As Walker Percy reminded us, and we ought keep reminding ourselves, one can "get all A's and flunk life"-meaning one can answer

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some psychological theorist's hypothetical moral scenarios brilliantly in a given office or research setting, and then go into this world of sin and drive a car like an arrogant murderer, or push ahead in dozens of other ways that any moment may provide.

Back in the 1930s a host of brilliant people, including psychiatrists, psychologists, physicians, and, alas, philosophers, ministers, and priests made their various accommodations, if not scandalous agreements of support, with the Nazis. Those highly educated ones might have scored well in some psychological theorist's "scale" of moral development; might have obtained good results in a Rorschach test, in a TAT test; might have mastered the Minnesota Multi-Phasic examinations; might have gotten top scores in our SAT tests given prospective college students; might have been pronounced in possession of "stable personalities" by an examining psychiatrist-all too "stable," they were, all too in resonance with that much touted "reality principle," namely Hitler's murderous authority.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a singular person indeed, and when he blasted psychology and psychiatry, as he did in his prison letters, we ought take sharp notice. (We ought take sharp notice, too, of efforts to stifle criticism of aspects of psychology or psychiatry. When such criticism gets called "resistance," or a mark of a "problem"-then an ideology is at work: agree with us or be banished!) Bonhoeffer, it seems, was prophetic not only with respect to his nation's tragedy in the 1930s and early 1940s, but also with respect to the continuing threats which certain aspects of twentieth-century Western thinking pose to people of religious faith.