By Aaron P. Jackson and
Lane Fischer Editor’s
note: Latter-day Saints often worry that seeking psychotherapy
will negatively affect their souls — and for good reason.
The fundamental theories behind traditional psychological
dogma are often at odds with their religious beliefs. As a
result, leading LDS psychologists have come together to create
Turning Freud Upside Down: Gospel Perspectives on Psychotherapy’s
Fundamental Problems. For more information, please visit
www.byustudies.byu.edu
Confronting
the Interface between the Gospel and Psychology
While working at the counseling
center at the University of Utah, one of us noted an interesting
pattern. Potential clients would often present themselves
at the front desk, and when asked if they had any preferences
for the counselor they might see, many would reply either,
“I don’t care, as long as they’re Mormon,” or “I don’t care,
as long as they’re not Mormon.”
While this pattern illustrates
the tension that exists in Utah between the dominant Mormon
culture and “non-Mormon” culture, more importantly for our
purposes, it illustrates the fact that people care about the
potential impact of counseling on their personal values and
beliefs. They are wary of counselors whose belief systems
may differ from their own.
Many Christians are confronted
with the awkward interface between the gospel and psychology
when they or someone they love considers seeing a counselor.
Inevitably, they raise the question of the counselor’s religion.
However, this concern rarely seems to lead to questions about
the counselor’s theoretical perspectives, assumptions about
human nature, or counseling techniques.
Like the students at the University
of Utah, most people seem to feel that if a counselor shares
their religious beliefs, the counseling experience will be
safe for them. Our contention is that just having a counselor
who shares the same religious beliefs does not protect a client
from the negative impacts of psychological philosophies on
his or her religious beliefs. We believe that relatively few
counselors have been able to successfully reconcile the fundamental
assumptions of their religions with the fundamental assumptions
of counseling theories.
There are several reasons why
many counselors have difficulty reconciling psychology and
the gospel. First, for many decades, mainstream professional
psychology had an anti-religion bias. This bias restricted
even the discussion of religious values in the training of
mental health professionals. Only recently has psychology,
as a profession, begun to acknowledge this bias and become
more open to issues of spirituality in human experience. Accordingly,
many counselors completed their training without having an
opportunity to address such issues in academic settings.
Second, Christians in general
and Latter-day Saints in particular have historically mistrusted
the counseling profession. While some of this mistrust has
certainly been justified, this bias has led many Latter-day
Saint counselors to take one of two roads: either they have
adopted a counseling approach that is more “religious advising”
than counseling, or they have developed an intellectual distance
between their professional and religious views.
The reluctance to reconcile religion
and counseling theories was made painfully obvious to one
of us in a graduate counseling course at Brigham Young University.
The professor presented the mainstream counseling theories,
and the lecture led to some discussion of the philosophical
underpinnings of the theories as they related to the gospel.
Ultimately, as the class discussion highlighted the contradictions
between the philosophical assumptions inherent in the gospel
and the philosophies of the counseling theories, it became
apparent that none of the theories was particularly compatible
with the gospel.
Someone in the class asked the
professor how he reconciled these issues, given that he was
a practicing psychologist. He replied simply, “When I go to
church, I put on my church hat, and when I do counseling,
I put on my psychologist hat.” It is difficult to describe
how discouraging this pat answer was to those of us hoping
for some insights and practical advice on how to reconcile
the two philosophies. We realized that this professor had
simply abdicated the responsibility of developing a philosophy
that accounted for both religious and professional beliefs.
Our sense is that such philosophical
shallowness is common among mental health professionals, whether
religious or not. In the secular world of graduate school
at a public university, the other one of us had similarly
frustrating experiences. He recorded his thoughts and feelings
about his efforts to reconcile the gospel with his professional
training:
I was raised in a religious
mode. I still pursue my spiritual training and serve as
an elder and teacher in my church. My ideas are based more
in the scriptures than in “scientific” personality theory.
Yet, I have invested great sums of money and time away from
my family to pursue training as a behavioral scientist.
I have experienced frustration
with the prevailing intellectual tradition. Whereas my colleagues
answer questions by asking, “What do the data say?” (as though
the data speak with a voice of their own), my first impulse
is to ask, “What do the scriptures and the prophets say?”
One frustration emerges when the scientific community is disparaging
of my use of the scriptures as a base for exploration and
interpretation of observations.
The type
of questions I tend to ask is somewhat different than those
of my colleagues as well. When I ask the most basic questions
of the behavioral sciences such as “What is the nature of
humankind?” a myriad of corollary issues emerge. What is the
nature of law? What is the nature of freedom? What is the
nature of truth? What is the nature of good and evil? What
is the nature of human responsibility? What is the nature
of God?
To ask any
one of these questions is to ask them all. Another frustration
is that the scientific community doesn’t deal openly with
these issues. It is as though those types of questions are
best left to philosophers and theologians.
I am aware of the mantra repeated
in my classes that science is merely a mode of agreed-upon
procedures which render data for examination. Behavioral scientists
must then construct laws and interpret the data. Two problems
emerge with that construction. First, even if science is independent,
how can behavioral scientists construct laws and interpret
data without first approximating answers to those larger questions?
Second, how can an agreed upon
human procedure (science) not have implicitly woven into its
fabric an a priori image of humans, law, freedom, good,
evil, truth, responsibility, and God? If the assumptions and
values woven into science are wrong and unexamined, and I
am giving my life’s energies to this science, then I am at
great risk of a life of meaningless and error-ridden toil.
I have become like the alchemist’s apprentice who learns by
hard years of service to his master to do nothing.
This account describes the experience
of many students as they face psychology’s fundamental philosophical
and theoretical problems. As we have mentioned, those considering
seeing a counselor or referring someone for counseling have
similar frustrations if they consider the problems inherent
in the theories of potential counselors.
The Association of Mormon Counselors
and Psychotherapists (AMCAP) published a text by Richard Williams
entitled “The Restoration and the ‘Turning of Things Upside
Down’: What Is Required of an LDS Perspective?” In this address,
he articulated an argument for radically reconsidering our
assumptions about applied psychology:
There is perhaps no set of scriptural
passages closer to the center of our restored religion than
those found in Isaiah 29 that deal with the ‘marvellous work
[and] ...[the] wonder’ that is about to come forth among the
children of men (Isa. 29:13-14). These same passages, part
of the message of the First Vision, are also found in 2 Nephi
27. In the 2 Nephi version, beginning in verse 24 we read:
And again it shall come to pass
that the Lord shall say unto him that shall read the words
that shall be delivered him: Forasmuch as this people draw
near unto me with their mouth, and with their lips do honor
me, but have removed their hearts far from me, and their
fear towards me is taught by the precepts of men —Therefore,
I will proceed to do a marvelous work among this people,
yea a marvelous work and a wonder, for the wisdom of their
wise and learned shall perish, and the understanding of
their prudent shall be hid.
The next verse talks about the
response of the world to this marvelous work and wonder. Here
we find the grounding of the vision I am trying to articulate:
And wo unto them that seek deep
to hide their counsel from the Lord! [These are, I believe,
the people opposed to the Restoration, those whose lives
are not informed and animated by the Restoration.] And their
works are in the dark; and they say: Who seeth us, and who
knoweth us? And they also say: Surely your turning of
things upside down shall be esteemed as the potter’s
clay. (v. 27, italics added)
Potter’s clay, in scriptural terms,
is worthless. It seems that from the perspective of those
not participating in the Restoration, it (the Restoration)
turns things upside down. From their perspective, surely something
that ‘turns things upside down’ is not going to amount to
much. It simply cannot be true; it cannot last. This “turning
of things upside down” is an image worth contemplating. It
is a very powerful metaphor. A turning of things upside down
is not a mere course correction. It is no minor adjustment.
Turning things upside down is not a process of refining. Certainly,
turning things upside down requires more than just adding
another dimension to the wisdom of the world. I submit that
we must assume that ‘turning things upside down’ does just
that: it turns the wisdom of the world on its head.
Williams argued that the Apostasy
permeated all aspects of intellectual life. He demonstrated
how modern and postmodern constructions of psychology lead
to nihilism. He argued that the Restoration of the gospel
was and is the remedy for the philosophical errors of traditional
metaphysics. The major implication of his text is the need
to build a psychotherapy from the foundation of the Restoration.
Williams’s text rekindled our hopes that psychotherapists
could eventually practice from a philosophical base that is
consistent with the restored gospel of Jesus Christ. He stated:
“I think it absolutely crucial
that people informed and enlightened by the restored gospel
of Jesus Christ stand firm against an increasingly forceful
and turbulent secular mainstream. This is even more important
for those of us engaged in a profession that undertakes to
recommend or even prescribe to others how to live more effective
and meaningful lives and provide those whom we teach or serve
the means to improve their lives. There is no insight nor
any understanding comparable to the restored gospel in providing
meaning, focus, direction, and value to the enterprise of
helping people live meaningfully and effectively.”
Part
II will look at the doctrinal foundation of relationships
and how relationships are crucial to human happiness, as well
as foundational to all creation. The powerful “I-You” concept
of relationships is also explained through a case study of
a mother that lost two of her children to a car accident.
To learn more or to order Turning Freud Upside Down, go
to www.byustudies.byu.edu.
________
Williams, R. N. (1998). Restoration and the “turning
of things upside down”: What
is required of an LDS perspective? AMCAP Journal,
23, 1–30.
