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Table of Contents
Introduction ix
Chapter 1 Modern Origins and Trends of Catholic Psychology 1
Chapter 2 Foundations of a Catholic Clinical Psychology 17
Chapter 3 IDP’s Teleological and Anthropological Bases 31
Chapter 4 IDP’s Epistemological and Moral Bases 49
Chapter 5 IDP’s Catholic Existential Orientation 65
Chapter 6 IDP’s Tripartite Conceptualization of Mental Health 69
Chapter 7 IDP’s Theory of Personality 87
Chapter 8 IDP’s Theory of Psychotherapy 101
Chapter 9 IDP’s Mechanisms of Psychotherapy 119
Chapter 10 IDP’s Spiritual Elements 135
Appendix A Seven Principles of Imago Dei Psychotherapy 151
Appendix B The Psychovitiation of Catholicism 155
Appendix C The Clinical Need for a Catholic Psychology 159
Glossary 163
Bibliography 167
Index 173
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Introduction
The need for the development of a Catholic clinical psychology is urgent. Not only are confessors hard pressed to find Catholic clinicians for penitents who manifest psychological needs beyond their clerical competency and responsibility, but the profession of psychology itself would profit immensely by accessing the wellsprings of truth concerning the human person that is found in the Catholic worldview. Indeed, in practice the Catholic clinical psychology herein espoused need not be overtly Catholic, for its implementation entails philosophical principles once removed from the Catholic theological truths that have facilitated their discovery.
One would expect that, given the academic and humanistic tradition of Catholicism and the fact that the very matrix of modern science itself is the Catholic Christendom of the Middle Ages, Catholic clinical psychology would be a well established and defined entity. However, because of historical and spiritual factors as outlined in subsequent chapters, this has not been the case. Indeed, the Imago Dei Psychotherapy conceptualization presented in this treatise comes on the scene as the seminal school of a belated Catholic clinical psychology.
Because of this seminal nature, the foundational principles identified herein are expected to be in some way integral to any subsequent psychotherapy that is truly Catholic. That is, though these principles could be subject to categorization, emphasis, expression, and application in various combinations by other theoreticians, they are nonetheless deemed the essential constants of a Catholic clinical psychology, being derived as they are from the Church’s theological and philosophical understanding of the human person.
Of utmost import for such a conceptualization are the teleological, epistemological, and moral teachings of the Church in her presentation of an adequate anthropology. Thus the validation of any particular Catholic qua Catholic clinical psychology, including that herein espoused, will be determined by how fully it adheres to and applies the Church’s understanding of the human person. Imago Dei Psychotherapy (IDP) specifically adheres to and applies the Catholic worldview in a Thomistically-based and existentially-orientated manner. IDP’sThomistic base best assures its orthodox moorings, which provides the clinician with the objective and normative truths concerning the human person that are necessary for the restoration of mental health. Imago Dei Psychotherapy’s existential orientation, itself derived from the Thomistic philosophy of existence or being, gives primacy to the person’s transcendental yearnings as a seeker of truth and allows the clinician to enter into the subjectivity of a therapants1 and thus appraise his mental state.
As the name implies, Imago Dei Psychotherapy seeks to restore the image of God when that image (i.e., the rational/volitional nature of the human person) is marred by mental illness and personality distortions. Imago Dei Psychotherapy conceptualizes the restoring of the image of God, or the regaining of mental health, as enabling a therapant to perceive, receive, reflect and act upon the real. This Imago Dei psychotherapeutic conceptualization is based on the Thomistic principle of moral agency where the fully human act entails rational assent to truth and a subsequent volitional embracing of this truth as the good.
This treatise aims at facilitating the establishment of a clinical practice that is integrally located within an orthodox Catholic worldview, thus taking as its end that which the Church holds out to be the good of the person: a good that is, finally, of the soul, and thus entails the sanctification of the person. At the same time, it is recognized that whereas the Church is concerned specifically with sanctification, and hence with the remission of sin and the transmission of grace, Catholic psychology qua psychology is concerned specifically with mental health.
Thus the eradication of sin and the implementation of grace are outside the realm of psychology’s competency. However, the effects of sin and grace are of utmost clinical concern. Whereas the sacraments deal with the eradication of sin, psychotherapy deals with the eradication of sin’s effects, be these the residual effects of original sin (dimming of the intellect, weakening of the will, and concupiscence) or actual sin (acquired characterological flaws). So too, while the sacraments and grace can directly impact the efficacy of the therapeutic process, psychology can indirectly impact sanctification by removing obstacles that impede receptiveness to God’s grace. Indeed, psychotherapeutic change is at times necessary before a person can effectively enter into spiritual direction.
While new scientific techniques are expected to be produced by Catholic clinical psychology, nonetheless, it is not the science of psychology that is essentially distinctive in such a clinical practice, but rather the ordering and locating of that science within the Catholic worldview. When this is done, not only is the faith of the therapant facilitated or nurtured, but —and this is the driving hypothesis of this treatise—the potential of clinical psychology is actualized in a superlative manner when it avails itself of the fullness of truth concerning the person that only the Church possesses. An authentic Catholic clinical psychology, then, entails both a scientific psychology that depends on the truths of philosophical psychology and a philosophical psychology that is validated by and draws on sacred theology.
The complete propriety of such a subalternated2 position of psychology to Catholicism via philosophy is a singular phenomenon, for Catholicism is singular as a religion in its thorough and correct philosophical enunciation. As such, it is believed that this treatise utilizes a paradigm of integration not apparent in modern integrative literature, which has historically been developed from a Protestant point of view. The model of subalternation employed herein works best with a worldview that has a comprehensive, integral, and definitive metaphysics that is able to fully subsume and direct the science of psychology. The typical dearth of philosophical augmentation found in the Evangelicalism that has given rise to much of the integrative efforts and the inherent lack of unified thought in the varied worldviews of Protestantism has made such a subalternation unattainable from the Protestant perspective. So too, the historic divorce in Protestantism of grace and nature, and therefore faith and reason, makes its integration of an altogether different quality than a Catholic integration.
Because Imago Dei Psychotherapy is based directly on the philosophical truths of Catholicism/Thomism and thus, if you will, one step removed from theology, it need not employ revealed truths in its therapy or require faith from its therapants. For the nature of the human person remains the same regardless of their belief system. However, for the practice of IDP a clinician is required to both intellectually assent to the Catholic worldview—to reality–and be on the path to conforming himself to it. The more a clinician is himself able to convert and conformto reality and to Christ (and him crucified) the more he is able to guide therapants, who themselves must courageously engage this reality in an intensive and arduous process that requires nothing less than a “dying to self.”
Most of the founders of modern psychology had an aversion to the absolutism of the God of Revelation and subsequently to the absolutism of Catholicism. One of these founders was William James (1882), the father of the psychology of religion and a major influence of previous Christian integration efforts because of his openness to an indefinite (but definitely not Catholic) spirituality. James in his seminal work Varieties of Religious Experience sardonically writes, “if we could descend on our subject from above like Catholic theologians, with our fixed definitions of man and man’s perfection and our positive dogmas about God, we should have an easy time of it” (Lecture XIV).
James was inadvertently prophetic. For there has been, and it is expected there will continue to be, a certain ease and facility that accompanies the belated development of Catholic clinical psychology—since truth begets truth. Indeed, such has been the case with the development of Imago Dei Psychotherapy, a gift from the treasury of the Church that required relatively little innovation in its theoretical conceptualization. It is also confidently expected that, in time, the implementation of a Catholic clinical psychology subalternated to Catholicism’s “fixed definitions” and “positive dogmas” will yield remarkable empirical evidence of such a psychology’s superior therapeutic efficacy, thus adding another confirmation that these definitions and dogmas truly do descend from above.
1 The term therapant, or a person who is receiving psychotherapy, is herein introduced to avoid the consumeristic connotation of “client,” the passive connotation of “patient,” and the confessorial connotation of “directee.”
2 In Scholasticism, the direct dependence of a lower science upon the truths of a higher science is termed subalternation. See Chapter 2, “Subalternating Psychology to Catholic Truth.”