Psychology and “Outwarn Theology”
Correspondence
PSYCHOLOGY AND “OUTWORN THEOLOGY” To the Editor of Mental Health Dear Sir,?Having read through the May number of Mental Health, I find myself moved to Protest against some misleading expressions of your contributor ” A.T.” in his reviews of Psychology and the Parish Priest by Lindsay Dewar, and Marriage Counselling by David R. Mace.
In his first review, ” A.T.” makes use of that well-known cliche, itself I should have thought outworn?” Outworn Theology “?against which Psychologists base, he avers, their attack on religion. What is this ” outworn ” theology ? If it be that man possesses a spiritual element called the soul, able to survive physical death and answerable to God for all the actions of this life, then he is referring to what is as up-to-date now as it was 2,000 years ago and believed by all practising Christians and by many of other religions. Also, I should like to know what ” persecution” Darwin and Freud suffered at the hands of the Church ? He is perhaps unaware that persecution is a word with precisely the same meaning to-day as it held under the Caesars and he would not need to travel farther than Czechoslovakia or Hungary to find the truth to that effect, though he might not find himself among the persecuted there. In his introduction to Moses and Monotheism Freud remarked that he had withheld the publication of this book out of respect to the Christian Governments of Doctors Dollfuss and Schuschnigg which, for all that his views were diametrically opposed to the teaching of the Church, nevertheless allowed him full freedom both to live and to practise. It is true that he eventually fled from Vienna, but it was from the Nazis that he ran. Turning now to his review on Marriage Counselling ” A.T.” remarks that more than half the persons seeking advice to repair their marriages profess to religion, which he states is higher than would be obtained in a normal population, and he implies that there is a correlation between religion and marital disharmony. Anyone who deals with patients in hospital knows that not 50 but almost 100 per cent, of admissions profess to belong to some denomination and, consequently if only half of the patients whose cases are discussed in Dr Mace’s book made such a claim, they represented a sample of the population more indifferent to religion than the average.
I think it is a pity that statements such as these, which at least imply loose thinking on the part of your reviewer, should find their way into a journal such as Mental Health.
Yours faithfully, Joseph Walker. Medical Officer of Health. Health Department, Feethams, Darlington.
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