Psychology and the Parish Priest
- Author:
Lindsay Dewar, B.D. A. R. Mowbray & Co. Ltd.,
London and Oxford. 5s.
Canon Dewar’s book is very timely. At the International Congress on Mental Health, held in August, 1948, in London, emphasis was frequently laid on the fact that the parson was a member of the mental health team. The antipathy between the exponent of the young and growing science of human behaviour and authoritarian religion, has prevented the co-operation which would be of mutual benefit to both. The Church traditionally has resisted advances in the field of science, as witness its persecution of Galileo, Darwin, Freud and others. Very few now disagree with the findings of the earlier scientists, and it is a pity that the theologians should base their attack on psychological hypotheses that have been modified in the light of findings during the last 20 years. Similarly, the psychologists, both medical and lay, base their attack on religion on outworn theology. This book seeks to combine the two disciplines, and points the way to a field common to both. One large stumbling block in the co-operation between the medical psychologists and the parson, is on the question of auto-erotism. In most cases the psychiatrist looks on this as a phase in normal development. Occasionally it becomes a. symptom of a deeper disharmony, and, as the author rightly points out, the treatment of this underlying disharmony is the obvious method of attack. He quite rightly says that the first thing to be done is to bring maladjustments to light. It is disappointing to find that later on in the same section he refers to the symptom as a ” troublesome sin “. This suggests a state of ambivalance and does not make clear that the problem may be one of sin, sickness, or a normal phase of development.
Be this as it may, this book is a great advance on the rigid denunciatory attitude of the Church as a whole who, in refusing to co-operate with this new science, is not following the steps of its predecessors who used the invention of printing for dissemination of the ” Good News ” by the written word. After all, the psychiatrist and the priest use the same method. To use the words of Hans Prinzhorn, the eminent continental psychiatrist, “It is the love of the physician that heals the patient.” A.T.
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