DID YOU KNOW?
This week’s Did You Know is excerpted from a South Bend professor’s book, “Changed by Grace.”
John Wesley was the earliest English-speaking author whom I have read who used the term “psychotherapy” (although given his classical background he left it in the original Greek as psyches therapeia. In Greek it meant the “healing of souls.” This was the central task of all real spirituality, and both he and Jonathan Edwards believed that theologians needed to take seriously the findings of modern psychology in order to carry that job out effectively.
It should be said that throughout the middle ages, and early modern period, the healing of souls (cura animarum, “the cure of souls” in Latin) had been the province of the ordained clergy alone. It was not until the time of Sigmund Freud and William James, at the end of the nineteenth century, that serious attempts were made to develop a totally secular version of psychotherapy. In the attempt to give an equivalent prestige to the new secular psychological methods, the Freudians hitched their wagon to the M.D.’s and the medical profession, while those who followed James’ approach linked their approach to the newer secular Ph.D. programs that had begun to appear in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century. The modern American university degree called the Ph.D. or “doctor of philosophy” was developed at John Hopkins University during that period and rapidly began offering at universities all over the United States, finally replacing the medieval master’s degree as the standard advanced graduate degree in numerous academic fields. It is important to note this because the M.D. psychiatrists, the Ph.D. psychologists, and the M.S.W. psychotherapists propagandized so effectively in the twentieth century for their right to also engage in the “cure of souls,” that many modern people assume that psychological disciplines are inherently “secular” studies, and that religion has no “right” to discuss psychotherapeutic issues.
So we have people arguing, on that false presupposition that A.A. must be either totally spiritual or totally psychologically orientated, one or the other. Those who recognize the importance of the spiritual parts of the twelve step program can then be misled into believing that any discussion of the psychological components of alcoholism and alcoholic ways of thinking is a “betrayal” of A.A.’s purely spiritual program. This is a real tragedy, because what A.A. did in fact was to restore the original Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Reformation understanding that the healing of the psych (the Greek and New Testament word for soul) was an essentially spiritual discipline, and that the attempt to create psychotherapies on atheistic assumptions invariably ended up castrating the discipline and rendering it ineffective at any deep level. William James and Carl Jung, both of whom recognized the need to maintain the linkage between psychotherapy and spirituality, were far wiser than Sigmund Freud in this regard. That was why the early A.A. leaders turned to James and Jung as models, along with another good psychologist of that period, whose name is less well known today but who was an important figure during that era, Ernest M. Ligon, author of Psychology of Christian Personality, a book which was on the recommended reading list which was handed out to newcomers in the Akron A.A. program. Dr. Bob, Sister Ignatia, and the other early Akron leaders all recognized, just as much as people on the East Coast, the need for synthesis between good spirituality and good psychological theory. It is a total falsification of early A.A. history when some historians attempt to create the illusion of an absolute dichotomy between a “totally spiritually based” Akron A.A. and a “totally psychologically orientated” and nearly atheistic New York A.A. Neither stereotype is true.
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