Psychobabble

Interviewing a couple she calls Tom and Laura Brett, Maggie Scarf asked Tom what attracted him about Laura. He said that in addition to being pretty, smart, and funny, she was a challenge.

“A challenge because of her sincerity, I suppose, and her honesty, too. It’s all there,” he added, with a small shrug, “in her language.”

“Her language?” I gazed at him quizzically. He, however, was exchanging a knowing, fond look with his wife. “Church language,” he explained, running a quick hand through his curly brown hair. “Listening to Laura talk to her friends, you hear certain terms come up again and again. Things like ‘letting yourself be vulnerable’ and ‘investing yourself in a decision.’” (Intimate Partners)

Given that church language was the clue to Laura’s challenging ethics, we might have expected Tom to mention terms like sin, repentance, redemption. But to Tom, “church language” consists of what some of us fondly call psychobabble, the language of popular psychology.

Across the ages, the church has been haunted—hindered and helped—by alien spirits. Time was when the ghosts skulking behind pulpits and visiting in the choir stalls were mostly philosophers: Plato, Aristotle, Kant; and more recently, Hegel, Marx, Whitehead, Heidegger. In the best cases, their conversation stimulated Christian thinking and threw light on aspects of our life and calling that we might otherwise have missed. But sometimes the philosophers affected the pulpit more than the gospel of Jesus did; it was their spirit, rather than the Holy Spirit, that became the spirit of the community; it was their words, and not the Word of Life, that were taken to heart by the congregation.

Recently psychologists have largely displaced the philosophers. Seminars in Rational Christian Living teach believers how to avoid depression, anxiety, unproductive anger, and overeating through rational self-management. In Episcopal congregations, the air is often thick with the mysterious breath of Carl Jung. Small-group Bible studies have a distinctly encounter-group air about them, what with all the sharing of feelings and “needs” that goes on there. We hear about “sensitivity” and “openness” and “being in touch with our feelings.” We learn to accept ourselves and to get in touch with our unconscious or the child within. We class ourselves as introverted or extroverted, feelers or thinkers, sensers or intuitives.

Why does psychology tend to weave itself into sermons, prayers, Bible studies, pastoral care, retreats, spiritual self-reflection, and vestry meetings? Why does the church’s language not get equally infused with the latest developments in fiber optics or subatomic particle physics or genetic engineering? The answer is obvious: The church is not in the business of physics or genetics, but from its earliest days it has been in the person business—transforming people from being damaged, poorly functioning, unfulfilled, hostile, and anxious, to being whole, well-functioning, fulfilled, loving, and at peace. In other words, the church has always dealt in practical psychology.

What It Is to Be a Self

Christian spirituality (or psychology, if you will) has resources for explaining (diagnosing) what goes wrong with people psychologically. The ancient Christian lists of sins, along with the analysis of how the sins do their dirty work—for example, the “seven deadly sins” of pride, envy, sloth, greed, anger, lust, and gluttony—provide a kind of diagnostic scheme. The lists of Christian virtues, again with analysis of their psychological profile—for example, faith, hope, love, humility, compassion, contrition, gratitude, patience, perseverance, self-control—provide a psychological character-ideal, a notion of what the fully functioning person is like. The Christian disciplines of worship, prayer, meditation on God’s Word, meditation on special exemplars of human excellence (saints), service to others, gift-giving (especially to the poor), and fellowship with other Christians are ways of pursuing this proper personal life and shaping our characters as mirrors of God and sisters and brothers of one another. They are, as it were, the basic “therapeutic interventions” of Christian psychotherapy.

To draw the connection in the other direction, we could say that the psychologies of Carl Rogers, Albert Ellis, Carl Jung, Heinz Kohut, and others are really alternative spiritualities: like Christianity, they are ways of conceptualizing what it is to be a person, along with diagnostic schemes and sets of disciplines by which to arrive at better “health”—that is, to grow toward true personhood or away from various forms of failure to be proper persons. These psychologies are, of course, in various ways unlike Christianity in what they take persons to be, so I call them alternative spiritualities. That is why Christians, who insist that persons be formed as children of God, must understand these psychologists’ spiritualities and know just where the continuities and discontinuities with Christianity lie.

The danger is that these psychologies may, to one degree or another, replace Christianity without most people even noticing that any substitution has taken place. In some instances, the influence of the therapies—even from within the church—may be so strong that our character and relationships are no longer Christian but are now family-systemic or Jungian. Our love may be Rogerian empathy, our courage the updated Stoicism of Ellis’s Rational-Emotive Therapy, our forgiveness motivated by our therapeutic “right to be free from hate.” In short, the language we assimilate and the disciplines to which we submit may make our souls therapeutic rather than Christian.

The Christian will agree with Charles Taylor when he says that having a self is quite a different thing from having a kidney. You can have a kidney without having any ideas about kidneys, says Taylor, but to have a self necessarily involves having some ideas about what it is to be a person, about what is important in life, about what the goal of life is, and about what persons can do. We are “self-interpreting animals.” As selves, we do not live by bread alone but by the “words” in terms of which we interpret ourselves, whether these proceed from the mouth of God or the mouth of our Jungian analyst or our Marxian political science professor or Carl Sagan or the pop Darwinians who write for Time. All these thoughts, these words, these understandings are out there floating around in our social environment, inside and outside the church, and they constitute, in significant part, a kind of spiritual junk food. They tell us what it is to be a person, what it is to be fulfilled, what kind of world we live in, what truth is, and how we are to think if we are to be rational.

We are what we eat, according to the biblical psychology. Since we are verbivorous beings, the words we chew, swallow, and digest will determine how we see the world, what we take to be important, how our behavior, our character, and our very life are shaped.

Since persons are verbivores, those who seriously interpret themselves in Christian terms will tend to have Christian selves; those who seriously interpret themselves in Rogerian or Jungian terms will tend to have Rogerian or Jungian selves. The various psychotherapies and personality theories that are influential today are not just neutral medical technologies or scientific theories; they are philosophies of life that endorse particular virtues, character traits, or features of personality. These are the traits a person would have if her therapist succeeded in making her into a fully functioning and mature person—mature, that is, by that therapist’s reckoning. And they are traits the therapy is designed to foster.

These therapeutic virtues are often similar to the Christian virtues, and this is perhaps one reason Christians are attracted to the psychologies and feel comfortable with them. But the therapeutic virtues are not only similar to the Christian ones; they are also, in important ways, quite different from them—even incompatible with them.

Becoming a Double Lover

Many of the secular psychologies identify some basic “need” or “drive” that sets the most fundamental agenda for a human life. Freud, for example, says that we are driven by a need for sexual fulfillment that we cannot properly satisfy in direct ways. The fundamental task, then, is to find socially acceptable ways of satisfying our instinctual needs.

Christian psychology can be read as having the same pattern of positing a basic need or potential or drive, and then seeing human troubles and maladjustment as forms of failure to achieve what our basic nature requires. Our basic need is identified in the double commandment: You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and your neighbor as yourself (Matt. 22:37—40). This state of proper attachment to God and neighbor is what we were made for; it is this toward which our hearts most basically incline, despite all appearances to the contrary. We are “nothing” without love, according to the apostle Paul (1 Cor. 13:2). As Saint Augustine comments, we were created with a (suppressed and often hidden) drive to praise and honor God, and our hearts are “restless” until we “rest” in God.

Any Christian psychology that is developed with the help of concepts from the secular psychologies will have to remain faithful to this premise: we are made to love God and will find complete “mental health” only when we do so.

Diagnosing Sin

Sin is without any doubt the chief diagnostic category of biblical psychology. In the New Testament, sin is not just a set of misdeeds but a perverse state of the person and thus a psychological state, a state of the soul. It is a “nature” that one has put on, an orientation, a matter of perverse motives (Eph. 4:22; Gal. 5:16-21; 1 John 2:16). Insofar as Christianity is a word about the overcoming of sin, it is, in the most literal sense of the word, a psychotherapy—a cure for sick souls. But as a concept of psychic dysfunction, sin has three features that non-Christian concepts of dysfunction lack: sin is offense against God, is the result of responsible human agency, and is incurable by merely human effort. Let us look at the last two of these.

Responsibility. The dominant tone of many therapies is that the client is a victim of his society, his unjust upbringing, his early self objects, poor training, or ignorance. Some therapies give the impression that the very idea that a person is responsible for his dysfunction is antitherapeutic. (“Don't make the client feel guilty.”) However, one of the chief therapeutic strategies of Christianity is forgiveness—God’s forgiveness of sinners offered in Jesus Christ, and each sinner’s forgiveness of others. And forgiveness implies guilt; it applies only to someone who is dysfunctional by his own responsibility. Nor can he properly receive forgiveness unless he feels his guilt and repents of his sin. Thus the biblical psychology stresses the therapeutic importance of contrition, that emotion in which the individual regrets his state and dissociates himself from it while taking responsibility for it (Luke 3:7—9; 7:36—50; 18:8—14; 2 Cor. 7:8—10).

A worry that seems to lie behind therapists’ shyness about ascribing responsibility to the client is that being “judgmental” will merely raise the client’s defenses and preempt the development of therapeutic trust. Christian psychology is as much opposed as any other psychology to judgmentalism (Matt. 7: 1—5) if we think of the judgmental attitude as a kind of contempt by one person, who sees herself as “righteous,” of another whom she regards as inferior to herself because of the other’s sinful condition.

This is an alienating and untherapeutic attitude, to be sure, but the remedy need not exclude ascribing responsibility. What is pernicious about judgmentalism is not the judgment being made, but the contempt that alienates one human being from another. The Christian doctrine of sin is that “there is no distinction” between therapist and client in this regard, “since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23).

It is a requirement of proper Christian maturity that each one of us recognize emotionally his own sinfulness and dependency on God’s grace. A pervasive attitude of contrition is a mark of Christian holiness, and surely will be a mark of the Christian therapist. Rogers and Kohut stress therapist empathy and require it not to be an artificial attitude or mere “technique,” but to make itself felt to the client out of the depths of the therapist’s personality. Christian psychology agrees with this, but adds that contrition is an equally important virtue for the therapist to possess. Contrition is the attitude that will prevent judgmentalism as the therapist discusses the client’s sins with her.

Incurability by merely human effort. Besides being a misrelationship with God, and a kind of dysfunction for which the sufferer is to some extent responsible, sin is a condition for which there is no cure by merely human effort. As the New Testament declares, sinners are “dead [in their] trespasses and sins” (Eph. 2:1) and need to be “born again” (John 3:1—15). Sin is by definition a condition from which one must be rescued by God. The central story of Christianity is about that rescue operation. So we have two tightly related psychotherapeutic acts of God: the incarnation, ministry, death, and resurrection of God’s son, two thousand years ago in Palestine, and the healing work of the Holy Spirit in individuals and congregations throughout the ages and down to the present day.

This means that distinctively Christian psychotherapy, no matter how extensively it uses strategies adapted from the secular therapies, will always enlist the help of God—reconciliation of the client with God through the work of the Holy Spirit—and this will mean at some time (the time will need to be judiciously chosen) acknowledging explicitly God’s saving act in Palestine two millennia ago and prayerfully invoking present help from his Holy Spirit. It will also involve integrating the client into a faithful congregation where he may find fellowship and opportunity to partake of Holy Communion.

Denying Our Lesser Selves

Under the influence of secular therapies, Christians have grown uncomfortable with the idea of self-denial, but it is important both as a strategy against sin and as a positive part of Christian life and growth. We have been led to feel that the self is sacrosanct: just as in an earlier time it was thought never fitting to deny God, so now it seems never right to deny oneself. But just as it was okay, in a God-fearing age, to deny idols but not to deny the true God, so in our age we must convince people that while it is wrong to deny one’s true self, it is okay to deny false or lower selves.

As we saw earlier, “self” is not the name of something in the way that “kidney” is the name of an anatomical part. A self is a function of a self-interpretation, a “word” that gives the self shape and substance. According to the Christian Word, the core of the selfhood of all of us—what we most truly are as selves, whether or not we have actualized and acknowledged this—is that we are bearers of God’s image, made and intended to be his children, to love him and our neighbor and to serve in his kingdom. This is the self that Christian nurture promotes and that Christian psychotherapy restores.

This self is sacrosanct in Christianity; it would always be wrong to deny one’s nature as a child of God. All “selves” that are in opposition to this one, or even of lesser status, are candidates for denial, and this denial may be very therapeutic. When a person denies herself so as to become more open to God or to others, she is denying not her true self but a false or pseudo or inadequate self—at minimum, a lesser self.

This is not at all to deny that self-denial is painful and felt (in a way) as a denial of one’s true self. For example, I may wish to do something that is comfortable and satisfying (talk with my friends, read a book), but my son wants to play a game with me or talk with me about something interesting to him but boring to me. If I stop what I am doing and talk or play with him, then I am denying myself for his sake. And if my self-denial so succeeds that I enter wholeheartedly into this fatherly activity and am not just gritting my teeth and doing my fatherly duty, then I transcend my selfish, inadequate, or lesser, self and find a truer self whose identity is “father of this boy” and “steward of God.”

A Christian psychology sees the human self as a strong agent—not just a pawn pushed about by environmental and genetic inheritance but one who, though acting within limits set by inheritance, is decidedly an agent—an individual who himself is responsible for what he does and what he becomes. Self-denial expresses this status of responsible agency, for it is by definition something that the individual undertakes, not something that just happens to him. In self-denial the individual doesn’t “go with the flow,” thus letting the flow be responsible for his character; he takes his life and selfhood into his own hands. The fact that self-denial goes “against the grain” makes it even more agency-producing than other consciously undertaken acts.

Lastly, self-denial is required because of sin. So far I have spoken of denying the actual self not because it is bad but because it is not the essential, truest self. It is not bad to want to be alone, to desire food for oneself, to want to write a book or make some other personal success, but these desires do not express what is deepest in us, according to a Christian psychology. So we deny the lower self in the interest of the higher. But according to biblical psychology, we not only have a lower nature that needs taming and subordinating; we also have a sinful nature that needs to die.

So if I find myself embroiled in patterns of envy and pride, I need to die to self, to be crucified with Christ (Gal. 2:20)—not just to subordinate my invidious self to my kingdom self, but to get rid of it altogether. Christian psychotherapy will devise methods, often no doubt partially indebted to the strategies of the secular therapies, for helping individuals bring about this death.

Suspicion and Appreciation

In various secular therapies, we can see themes to which Christian psychology has been committed since the time of its origin. For example, Rogerian therapy stresses the curative power of acceptance and empathy—something formally akin to the attitude that God shows to humanity in Jesus Christ, who shares our sufferings and forgives us and welcomes us into his kingdom. Ellis stresses the importance, for healthy living, of accurate “cognitions”—beliefs and orienting self-talk; Christianity as a healing message has always, at least in its orthodox forms, stressed the connection between proper psycho-spiritual formation and correct beliefs. Behavior therapy stresses the healing of relationships and psyche that can come from correcting behavior, reminding us of the many times that John the Baptist, Jesus, and Paul exhort their hearers to behavioral change in the interest of spiritual ends, and of James’s remark that faith is perfected by works (James 2:22).

Yet not only does each psychotherapy bear some resemblance to Christian psychology; each of them also, in one respect or another, contradicts Christianity. Our integration of insights and techniques from these other psychologies must therefore be done cautiously and with precision.

Still, because the therapies have developed their insights in a fairly rigorous way and have focused energetically on refining their own special techniques for person formation, it stands to reason that we can learn a lot through dialogue with them. Christian psychotherapy will be “eclectic” in bearing a number of resemblances to the secular therapies; some of these will be the result of its integrating features of those other therapies. But first and foremost, Christian psychology must be true to the complexity of human nature and to the distinctive biblical view of the self.

Robert C. Roberts is professor of philosophy and psychological studies at Wheaton College in Illinois and the author of Taking the Word to Heart(Eerdmans), from which this article was adapted.

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