Psychiatry for Catholics

A Roman Catholic priest and a psychiatrist have written a book that may solve, or at least clarify, some of the tension between their callings. Dr. Robert P. Odenwald, once a Berlin psychiatrist, now directs the Child Center at Washington's Catholic University. Father James H. VanderVeldt, a Dutch Franciscan and a Catholic University professor, formerly taught psychology in Rome; in 1931 he opened the church's first experimental-psychology laboratory there. In Psychiatry and Catholicism (McGraw-Hill; $6), the authors try to explain each to the other. With a preface by Washington's Archbishop Patrick A. O'Boyle, their book is the most authoritative and, in a guarded way, the friendliest Catholic statement about psychiatry to appear in the U.S.

The authors have no doubts about psychiatry's value. ("It would seem like carrying coals to Newcastle if one were to set out to prove the right of psychiatry to existence.") As much as anything, their book has been written to give suspicious fellow Catholics an inkling of psychiatry's nature and its worth.

A Set of Mechanisms. When it comes to strict Freudian psychiatry, Psychologist VanderVeldt and Psychiatrist Odenwald have their reservations. Their target is not Freud's medical techniques, but "the phillosophy that has gradually been tacked on" them. "Freud's most fundamental mistake was to view a person as a machine, a set of mechanisms, and to consider the psychoanalyst as a technician or mechanic who is supposed to mend these mechanisms when they function badly."

The authors find Freud's anti-religion philosophy (e.g., the theories that God is a "father-image" invented by man, that instincts--principally sex--motivate all human behavior) so much unproved and badly stated "dogma." Since patients often have moral problems connected with their neurosis, "it is dangerous, and very much so, when the psychiatrist is guided . . . by the materialistic philosophy of human nature which Freud championed so ardently." The book also frowns on modern "client-centered therapy," particularly when a doctor tries to solve "religious and moral difficulties" by dissecting the patient's psyche, then letting the patient put the pieces together again in whichever way his instincts suggest. They write: "[This] is based on the assumption that the source of valuing things lies exclusively in man himself . . . In the final analysis, it makes man his own God."

No Substitutes. In disagreeing with Freud's philosophy, the authors do not mean to throw psychiatry, or all psychoanalysis, out the window. They note that Freud got good results with his technique of analysis before he developed his complex conclusions about how the mind works. "This very fact," they say, "proves that the analytical technique can be disconnected from its philosophical superstructure." Few modern psychiatrists follow Freud faithfully, and many violently disagree with him. Odenwald and VanderVeldt are especially impressed with a new school of "existential analysis,"* which teaches that man is dominated by a "spiritual ego," not a sexual one. To the existentialists, "God is not a father-image, but . . . the father is an image of God." Often they have found that mental disturbances are due not to repressed sex, but to "unconscious or repressed religion."

Of non-Freudian analysis, they conclude: "Religion works on the conscious level; analytical psychology, to a great extent, on the unconscious level. There need be no opposition between the Catholic religion and analytical psychiatry, so long as the latter avoids smuggling into either its psychological theories or its therapy any philosophical theories that are unacceptable to the former . . . True, there are psychiatrists who have taken their Catholic patients' faith away, but there are also others who make better Catholics out of them by restoring their emotional balance . . ."

There is a polite suggestion that priests and psychiatrists would profit by studying each others' fields. The psychiatrist can treat Catholic patients more intelligently if he understands, among other things, that "sin and the feeling of guilt do not parallel each other." The priest might recall that the confessional is no substitute for the therapist's office. "Once a person has had a serious mental breakdown, he may--if he so wishes--go to church and light a candle, but right after that it would be a sensible thing for him to visit the office of a psychiatrist." The author's common-sense conclusion: "Religion is no substitute for psychiatry, nor psychiatry a substitute for religion."

* Almost no kin to Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialist philosophy, of which the Catholic Church takes a dim view.

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