Nervous Disorders and Religion

A Study of Souls in the Making

John G. McKenzie

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138675445
• eBook ISBN: 9781317198932
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Originally published in 1951, this title is a study in developmental psychology with special reference to the effect of various types of religion on mental health and religious experience. With instinct as a 'disappearing category' in the psychology of human nature, a new approach to the realization of a harmonious interior life has been made using a doctrine of biological and personality needs as a starting point. Human nature is acquired and is not a static datum. The interior conflicts, the development of conscience and the origin of guilt feeling, the morbid complexes and the character-trends resulting from these conflicts with their sense of guilt are all studied. A long chapter on the various methods of mental healing through the doctrines of psycho-somatic medicine, with a new approach to Spiritual Healing in particular, prepares the way for the final chapter on the types of religion which originate or accentuate psychological conflicts, and the kind of religion which leads to a basic sense of security and harmonious personality. The illustrations are nearly all taken from Dr McKenzie's own thirty years' experience of dealing with neurotic disorders.

This volume contains the substance (greatly expanded) of the Tate lectures delivered in Manchester College, Oxford, in 1947, and repeated at the St Andrews Summer School of Theology in1948 and at Iona Community.

Lecture 6
Religion and Nervous Disorders

IT will not be out of place if in the introduction to the final lecture I draw your attention to the fact that for the great mass of people, and indeed for many medical psychologists, psychology is synonymous with Psycho-analysis or McDougall’s Instinctive psychology. This has been a disadvantage to psychological science because both these psychologies give an inadequate analysis of the springs of behaviour as well as of personality itself. The popular mind has taken practically all it knows about psychology from popular expositions of Freudian concepts. The terms ‘complex’ and ‘repression’ caught hold of the imagination and along with the term ‘sexuality’ were supposed to explain all sorts of behaviour. Every deviation from the normal was supposed to be due to a complex, and the shy, restrained individual was thought to be suffering from repression. As I have already noted in the previous lecture, Freud, although he built up a rather impressive psychology, strong enough to attract the attention of psychologists, really made his finest contribution in the sphere of psychiatry more than in general psychology. There are large tracts of psychology which Freud never touched at all. McDougall more than any other psychologist, at least in this country, was responsible for the widespread popularity of the idea that all behaviour was due to the urge of instincts. The theory lent itself to easy explanations of both normal and abnormal behaviour, and with his idea (which was first mooted by Shand) that our instincts became organised within sentiments, character was also explained. The theory is simple to understand: our attention is attracted to something novel because we have a curiosity instinct; the sexes are attracted to each other by the sexual instinct; we become angry when thwarted because we have a pugnacious instinct; we love to show off because we have a self-display instinct. These instincts became organised into sentiments and thus we had character. The emotions which McDougall, in his first exposition, thought were integral elements of instinct, were capable of being compounded and we got all the complex emotions, such as Awe and Reverence. It was all very simple and very interesting in comparison with the older psychology. There was one unfortunate result, however. No two psychologists gave us the same catalogue of instincts! This rather confused matters; and the confusion was not lessened by the capacity of journalists to invent an instinct for every form of behaviour not accounted for in the usual catalogue. An Archdeacon of the Church of England spoke the other day of his ‘instinct for pacificism’; theologians began to speak of a ‘religious instinct’, dramatic critics of a ‘histrionic instinct’, reviewers of novels spoke of writers having an instinct for a ‘dramatic situation’. McDougall in his later books modified his view of instinct and spoke of propensities to this or that kind of behaviour. He believed that he was helping to break down the old ‘faculty’ view of behaviour; and to some extent he did help us to get away from the idea of a ‘faculty of memory’, of ‘thought’, of ‘imagination’, etc. But a great deal of his psychology simply substituted ‘instinct’ for ‘faculty’. He had no real doctrine of reason or of the self. Reason to him, as to Hume, had no initiative of its own; its function was to present to consciousness the means by which the instincts could be satisfied. Character was just the sum of the sentiments, and there was no real explanation as to why we should have one set of sentiments rather than another. Truly, like animals, we were pushed from behind. Conscience was no more than the voice of the herd, and the fear or approval of the herd decided our moral leanings. His theory kept intact the doctrine of continuity and thus was scientific, but it did nothing to explain our fundamental differences from the animal.

Contemporaneous with Freud and McDougall a great deal of psychological experiment and thought were being carried on in many fields. These schools of psychology had their interest concentrated almost wholly on normal mental processes, and it was they rather than the Freudians or Instinctivists who finally created the separation of psychology from philosophy and laid the foundations of modern psychology.

It is impossible here even to mention the various contributions of the schools to the psychology of education, industry, vocation, ethics. Nor can we go deeply into the psychology of religious experience. There is one school, however, which helps us immensely to understand how the mind is able creatively to go beyond the concepts which can be inferred from experience; while there is another school which has attempted to throw light on the problem of the self or subject of experience. What these schools teach is relevant to what I wish to say on religion and nervous disorders. First of all are the advances in our knowledge of intelligence and how it works. I believe that Spearman’s doctrine of ‘noe-genesis’ is a true answer to the Freudian contention that religion is a projection, although not the only answer. The relevant part of Spearman’s work is to be found in his principle of correlated eductions. When we have got a known item of experience with a known relation, we spontaneously tend to educe a correlated item. In other words, there is natural tendency for the mind to transcend its experience and to have ideas that not only go beyond experience but of objects which we could not experience through the senses. Such ideas are Eternity, Immortality and Perfection. Then we have the attributes of God. No one can experience the omniscience or omnipotence of God, yet they are objects of thought not in virtue of projection or mediated inference, but in virtue of the creative tendency of the mind to go beyond experience. I mention this in passing, as many find Freud’s projection theory difficult to answer. Psychologically there are ‘several ways of accounting for the occurrence in knowledge of concepts or notions, some of which do not take us beyond the range of empirical experience, while others enable us to transcend it’.(¹) It is doubtful if theologians have made as much use of Spearman’s theories as might have been done.

The school most relevant to our position is the ‘Personality School’. All schools have the problem of personality as their ultimate aim, but this latest school concentrates entirely almost on the study of personality as a whole. It is a comparatively young school. They acknowledge that much knowledge has accrued from the study and listing of various personality-traits, and from the fact that the laboratory has been able to assess the strength of will, depth of interest and temperamental influences. Nevertheless, their interest is not so much on the traits as on the principle that integrates the whole into a personality.

Naturally much attention has been given to the definition of personality. Here is the definition given by Professor Gordon W. Allport, on© of the leaders of the school in America: ‘Personality is the dynamic organization within the individual of those psycho-physical systems that determine the unique adjustments to his environment’.(¹) The emphasis is laid upon ‘unique’. They stress individuality; and they criticise the other schools of experimental psychology because they generalise as if there was such a thing as ‘mind in general’, an ‘individual in general’, whereas the individual is unique. They complain that the tendency of the experimental schools is to scatter the, attention upon details of behaviour and to forget that personality is a whole, and that the integrating factor of organisation must not be forgotten. Even the study of intelligence is apt to abstract intelligence from the intelligent individual. That we owe much to the study of single attributes no one will deny. Probably there is no other way in which a score can be given for single attributes ot character-traits; but when one has given a score for intelligence, rote memory, retentivity, perseverance, etc., the mere sum of these scores, as Allport like the Gestalt school reminds us, does not give personality.

One curious thing about this school is that it avoids the metaphysical implications. But the fundamental question for the psycho-therapist, as well as for the preacher and social worker is: has the individual, the integrating principle of personality, a say in what shall be integrated? If personality is something more than the sum of its parts, what is the something more? The school raises great hopes; but it is doubtful whether it will be the fulfilment of Professor James’s prophecy that one day psychology would produce its Galileo or Lavoisier who would also be a metaphysician.(¹)

It will be obvious that my own psychology is ‘Personalist’. To me the integrating principle of the dynamic organisation is the Self or Subject with its own dynamic tendency towards a self-conscious harmonious individual or whole. And I believe that the more self-conscious the tendency becomes, the greater say the self has in determining its adjustments and what will be integrated into the personality. To the degree that the individual consciously or unconsciously attempts to integrate what is inconsistent with a moral and spiritual whole to that degree he fails to realise a unified personality or breaks down.

Now it would be agreed by all psychologists that religious experience has a determining effect on the integration of the self. Not that psychologists necessarily accept the objectivity of religious beliefs. We have already seen that Freud contended that God is the projected need of the Father. James, on the other hand, believed there was a ‘something there’, and the feeling of that ‘something there’ was a moment in the religious experience and not simply an inference. Just as our experience of objectivity and externality is a moment in our sense experience of phenomena in the external world. We don’t infer from our sense experience that there is a table or chair there, nor do we project the table or chair; on the contrary, the objectivity and the externality of the table and chair are part of the sense experience. Otto(²) attempted to describe the ‘something there’ as the ‘numen’ whose presence we experience through the activity of the numinous disposition. It would take us too far to go into a critical estimate of those positions. But what we can say with confidence is that we can only respond or experience a situation if we have something to respond with. The very fact that we respond to the super sensuous is proof that we are endowed with some capacity that gives meaning to the super-sensuous experience. That does not imply that we have a ‘religious instinct’. Such a concept reduces religion to a biological need for its explanation; whereas religion, like ethics, logic and art must go beyond biological needs for their explanation. Animals have biological needs, but they have no religious experience.’(¹) The individual’s personality-need to realise himself as a self-conscious, spiritual whole with its drive for rational and moral unity, must, we believe, be invoked here. Given that the telos in man is the image of God striving to realise itself, to grow into the stature of Christ, and we have the real roots of religious experience. The dynamic image of God, the telos in man, is that which responds to the confrontation of God. Were there nothing in our nature that could respond to the supersensuous, to God, to the moral ideal, it would be psychologically impossible to explain man’s interest and pre-occupation with religion. The very relish with which a Hume or Freud set out to undermine the objectivity of religious experience, shows, at its least, that they are not indifferent to it, and at its most, that it may be an overcompensation for the repressed drive for that rational unity which cannot stop short of God, the very source of the unity and rationality of the universe which all thinkers seek.

One could go further here were one writing specifically on the psychology of religious experience. Granted that we can only respond to a situation if we have something to respond with, does it follow that a need implies and indeed involves the object to which we can respond and the object that satisfies the need? Hunger not merely implies food, but involves it; sex implies a mate; intelligence implies objects of knowledge. Every need, be it biological or personal, implies the objects that can satisfy. If man has a numinous disposition that involves a numen, just as structure involves function in biology. As Bosanquet(¹) has put it: ‘But in rerum natura an instinct implies its object; and if you find a special emotional impulse, such as that of worship and religion, which pervades all sorts of particular experiences, but maintains its unique suggestion and demand throughout them all, you can hardly help recognising the object of this emotion as at least some peculiar feature of the world’. Religion, we must remember, is not merely an idea of God but an experience of God. Alas! the content of the idea of God is not given but acquired and has a determining effect on the experience of God.

But I must not allow myself to get too entangled in philosophy. I must stick to empirical fact. If we accept Spearman’s theory of correlated educts, then the concept of God, His attributes and much else that transcends experience are yet empirically produced not by mediate inference, but by the natural creativity of the mind. And if we accept the doctrine of the telos of man as the image of God, then the very nisus of his personality is towards God and the realisation of that image in the self-conscious harmonious whole.

The interest in religion in these lectures lies in the fact that it plays such a large part in the nervous disorders of many people, and yet is the supreme unifier of the personality. Two sentences from Jung(¹) are relevant here: ‘Patients force the psychotherapist into the role of a priest and expect and demand of him that he shall free them from their distress’. That is because in a nervous disorder ‘man suffers in spirit’. The other sentence is: ‘Man has always stood in need of spiritual help which each individual’s religion holds out to him’.

Alas! not every kind of religion gives help to the telos in its striving to realise itself. Man needs a religion. It is an essential condition of the prospective aim of personality being reached. Just as food, clean air and good sanitary conditions are needs of a healthy organism, so religion is both a condition and a need of the health and realisation of the personality or soul. To the psychologist religious beliefs are a fundamental necessity of personality. Nevertheless he has no technique whereby he can pronounce that this or that religion or religious belief is true. He can, however, observe how certain types of religion have an adverse or good effect upon mental health and whether they tend to accentuate conflict of a neurotic kind or contribute to nervous disorders.

There is first of all The Religion of Law. The assumption of such a religion is that external to both God and man there is Law, the Law of Righteousness which must be obeyed; God Himself is as much bound by this Law as man; and He must see to it that the Law is obeyed and every violation is punished or expiated. Someone must bear the penalty of transgression or else there can be no forgiveness. The substitutionary theory of the Atonement was formulated to meet this demand. The Jews provided for this expiation in their sacrificial rites. Hence the idea of Christ as our sacrifice in the New Testament, and especially in the theology of St. Paul. In the East the doctrine of Karma is the attempt to deal with the same problem—the problem of the broken law and guilt; every deed has its effects and must be lived out in this life or in another.

Our interest is psychological and not theological. We are concerned only with the psychological and spiritual effects of such a religion. It is in this kind of study that we see how the content of the idea of God colours the whole of the religious experience.

Now such a religion gives sanction to the demands and threats of the prohibitive and infantile conscience. The fear of failure to meet these demands creates a state of unconscious moral instability often symbolised by the fear of heights, while the threats express themselves in various displaced fears, such as the fear of not being able to stand up to the trials of life, such as illness, bereavement and death. The fear of death is very common in those with a religion that means the keeping of the Law.

Such a religion acts as a policeman as well as a bully. The mind can have no peace; for the behaviour tendencies are not integrated with positive ideals, but simply checked by prohibitions. Repressed barriers are erected in the unconscious against perfectly legitimate tendencies, and these have to be continuously strengthened, for natural tendencies cannot be eradicated. The psychologist’s work here is to reduce the intolerance of the infantile conscience so as to give inner-release to the repressed tendencies by modifying the religious ideas. The fear of sin has to be replaced by faith in God’s power, and morbid guilt and especially the fear of it has to be replaced by a personal relation to God altogether removed from a juridical relation. We can see the effects of such a religion best in the neurotic character-trends it produces. Invariably those people whose religion is a Religion of Law suffer from what Karen Homey calls The Neurotic Character-Trend to Restrict their Life within Narrow Limits. The moral life becomes hedged in by all sorts of restrictions, and the sense of guilt can be excited by the most trivial indulgence, such as buying a newspaper on Sunday, a glass of wine, attendance at a theatre or any sensual pleasure. The natural drives of the personality come into conflict with these unhealthy prohibitions and restrictions and a severe neurosis may result with sympto...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Preface
• CONTENTS
• LECTURE I WHAT IS ORIGINAL HUMAN NATURE?
• LECTURE II WHAT IS ORIGINAL HUMAN NATURE? (Contd.)
• LECTURE III OUR INNER CONFLICTS AND CHARACTER-STRUCTURES
• LECTURE IV THE ORIGIN AND DISSIPATION OF GUILT
• LECTURE V SPIRITUAL HEALING
• LECTURE VI RELIGION AND NERVOUS DISORDERS