Bridging the gap between psychiatry and theology

Abstract

Both religion and psychiatry are engaged in saving souls. "Psychiatry" comes from two Greek words meaning soul and saving. And, if, as we should to be realistic, we go below the level of verbal correlations to actual histories of religion and psychiatry and examine what their operations seem to be aimed at, we find much overlap in goals: to prevent or to heal a broad range of debilitating disturbances of personal behavior commonly involving emotional distress and relations to other persons. However, psychiatry during the past century seems to represent another element of the art of healing man that has seceded from adherence within the "spiritualist" ideology and gone over to the "materialist" ideology, even though in some of the schools of psychiatry the hypothetical entities, such as "id" or "superego," have not always been much more clearly substantiated as observable entities than have gods or evil spirits. In any case, psychiatry has tried to become scientific in its understanding and treatment of emotional and behavioral disorders. As such its ideology and the rituals or practices it prescribes have separated themselves from the theological models and religious practices for healing the soul. Moreover, psy chiatry has commonly been looked on by the church as more of a heresy than has general medicine, partly because the latter's separation was largely accomplished a long time ago, but also because the former purports in some sense to save souls. In spite of the admitted disjunction or heresy of psychiatry from theology, their community of goals in healing souls has tended to foster some relationship, par ticularly at the level of practice. Beginning in United States Protestantism some