c. 2006 Religion News Service
(UNDATED) For years, Wally Fletcher, a Presbyterian minister and pastoral counselor, had a professional secret dark enough to merit a session on the couch: He believed in Freud.
“I felt I needed to keep my openness toward psychoanalysis in the closet,” said Fletcher, who is in training at the Philadelphia School of Psychoanalysis. But now, “I no longer feel that way. I feel comfortable saying I’m oriented toward psychoanalysis.”
Fletcher is among those pastoral counselors who say _ 150 years after Sigmund Freud’s birth _ that Freud may be making something of a comeback. For a man who called himself “completely godless” and was viewed with suspicion by many pastoral counselors, the renewed interest is quite a turnaround.
From the mid-1960s to the 1990s, Fletcher said, pastoral counseling “moved away” from Freud because there was a sense that psychoanalysis had become “elitist” and that many pastoral counselors saw “Freud as the authoritarian man behind rich people on the couch.”
Pastoral counseling is similar to other types of counseling, except most pastoral counselors have a special interest in _ or sensitivity toward _ matters of faith. Some are clergy, some are not.
Perhaps the anti-Freud backlash was not surprising, given what Freud, a lifelong atheist, said about himself. Born May 6, 1856 (he died in 1939), Freud described himself as a “completely godless Jew” in a 1918 letter to Oscar Pfister, a Lutheran pastor in Zurich.
At times, it appeared that he didn’t seem to have much patience for organized religion, either.
Writing in 1913 in “Totem and Taboo,” Freud said God, “at bottom, is nothing but an exalted father.” Later, in 1927’s “The Future of an Illusion,” Freud said people create a god who is “our father who art in heaven” so that he will “reconcile men to the cruelty of faith.”
Although a non-believer himself, Freud grappled with some of the same issues that religious people struggle with, said Randall Hoedeman, director of the Pittsburgh Pastoral Institute.
After his daughter Sophie died in 1920, “Freud’s grief was so profound that he said … he could understand why followers of religion would want to be reunited with their loved ones in the afterlife,” Hoedeman said.
Today, there is “a ferment of intellectual interest in Freud” within pastoral counseling, Fletcher said. There is a growing recognition that Freud’s ideas _ from the unconscious to transference _ “are crucial to how we minister to the struggle of the soul,” he added.
Freud’s most substantial contribution to psychotherapy was his use of psychoanalysis, which focuses on unconscious feelings and memories that are key to helping people understand their emotions, relationships and behavior.
“The idea of the unconscious, that events in the past influence the present, seems obvious now,” said Susan Chrystal, director of admissions and training at New York’s Blanton-Peale Institute. “But it wasn’t obvious before Freud.”
Pastoral counselors, trained in psychotherapy and theology, encourage people, if they wish, to talk about spiritual issues in their therapy, said Douglas Ronshein, executive director of the American Association of Pastoral Counselors. Unlike some types of therapy, pastoral counseling treats religious faith respectfully, he added _ often as part of the treatment, not necessarily as the problem.
“Freud is like Christopher Columbus,” Ronshein said. “His concepts are so embedded in pastoral counseling.”
Experts say Freud’s respectability is growing _ or returning _ because his feelings about psychoanalysis and religion are more complex than they seem, pastoral counselors say.
Freud, for example, didn’t believe psychoanalysis was completely antithetical to religion, Fletcher said. In 1909, Freud wrote to Pfister that “psychoanalysis is neither religious nor non-religious, but an impartial tool which both priest and layman can use in the service of the sufferer.”
Many liberal Protestant clergy in this country during the early 20th century welcomed Freud’s ideas, Fletcher said. “They believed that ministers had a responsibility to help the community,” he said, and “saw psychoanalysis as a way of doing this.”
Contrary to popular perception, Freud didn’t think psychoanalysis was only for those who could afford it, said Elizabeth Ann Danto, author of “Freud’s Free Clinics: Psychoanalysis and Social Justice, 1918-1938.”
“He and his family were poor during World War I. After the war, Freud believed that psychoanalysis should be accessible for everyone,” she said.
The first generation of psychoanalysis set up 10 free clinics throughout Europe. In 1939, Smiley Blanton, a psychiatrist who was a Freud protege, met Norman Vincent Peale, then pastor of New York’s Marble Collegiate Church. Peale, who died in 1993, was renowned for his belief in positive thinking and served as a mentor to Robert Schuller, founder of the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, Calif., and host of “The Hour of Power” television show.
When Peale and Blanton met, “it was the Depression. There were four soup kitchens within blocks of the church,” said Chrystal, of the Blanton-Peale Institute. Together, Blanton and Peale thought “wouldn’t it be great if we could teach clergy how to use psychoanalysis to help the (poor) people in the churches,” she added. Blanton-Peale, the oldest pastoral care training program in the country, grew out of that collaboration.
The legacy of Freud lives on, Fletcher said. “Modeled on Freud’s free clinics, we help everyone on a sliding scale,” he added. More pastoral counselors are taking a second look at Freud even as they study “modern advances in psychoanalysis,” Fletcher said.
Freud’s insights can help people “tell their stories _ to talk about their spiritual conflicts,” he said. The result, Fletcher said, is not only improved treatment for patients, but also “a renewed appreciation and ownership of Freud’s work.”
KRE/PH END WOLFE
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