News Release: Kenneth Baker, SJ, Editor of Homiletic and Pastoral Review Critiques Imago Dei Psychotherapy and Affirmation Psychotherapy.

Fr. Kenneth Baker, the esteemed and erudite editor of the venerable Homiletic & Pastoral Review examines both Conrad Baars’ Affirmation Psychotherapy, which is often touted as a or even the Thomistic or Catholic Psychotherapy and Dr. G.C. Dilsaver’s Imago Dei Psychotherapy.  In doing so Fr. Baker finds that Imago Dei Psychotherapy is the only truly Thomistic conceptualization, while Baars’ claimed attempt at such an integration is doubtful indeed.

 Fr. Baker in criticizing Affirmation Therapy writes, “We find in the book an attempted wedding between some of the insights of psychology and the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas.… Baars claims that St. Thomas agrees with him. I have some doubts about that; there are some important distinctions that should be made about the emotions, and our author does not make them. I attribute that to the fact that he is a psychologist and not a philosopher.” [i]

 Conversely in critiquing Dr. Dilsaver’s Imago Dei Psychotherapy, the unquestionably orthodox Fr. Baker definitively proclaims that “In this treatise on clinical psychology, we find a current presentation which is fully in accord with traditional scholastic philosophy and theology. The whole Catholic worldview of man made in the image of God, a composite being of spirit and matter, is the philosophical basis of Imago Dei Psychotherapy. This is an invaluable tool for Catholic counselors, psychologists and psychiatrists whose goal it is to bring their therapants to a state of mental health which is in accord with both the natural law and divine revelation.”

 Indeed, Imago Dei Psychotherapy is the first and as yet only fully integrated Thomistic and as such Christian integration.  It has achieved this unparalleled integration because it is based directly upon a philosophical anthropology and doesn’t merely use Christianity as a window dressing. Indeed, Dr. Dilsaver with his compilation of Imago Dei Psychotherapy is without a doubt the father of Christian psychology and should eventually become nothing less than the father of a new and dominant secular paradigm of psychology.  For Imago Dei Psychotherapy, identifying as it does the essential causation of mental disorders, is not just for believers but applies to all.  Given the time and the opportunity surely Imago Dei Psychotherapy’s unprecedented effectiveness will shatter the false and harmful models long enshrined the status quo mental health industry.


[i] Kenneth Baker, S.J. in the August/September 2008 issue of Homiletic & Pastoral Review