Religion: Psychiatry for Pastors

The doctor sat behind a desk at the apex of the L-shaped room; the ministers and their wives sat at ease before him. At the doctor’s right was a blackboard, and on his desk stood a microphone wired to a tape recorder which ran steadily throughout the four-hour session. “It has been said that the line between love and hate is razor-thin,” said the doctor. “It’s thinner than that. It’s not there at all. Hate is simply a counter-attitude to love.” Nobody demurred at that, and the ministers and their wives went on to talk of other things—not shoes and ships and sealing wax, but exhibitionism and impotence, sexual deviation and married love.

Masochist, or Son of God? This relaxed gathering in Omaha last week was the latest meeting of a group of 38 men and women, mostly Methodist ministers and their wives who have been getting together about once a month for the past two years. They began when a church-going Omaha pediatrician named Dr. Charles Tompkins decided that while ministers and psychiatrists were trying to do much the same job, the psychiatrists were doing it better. He persuaded his medical-school classmate, Dr. G. Alexander (“Bob”) Young Jr., who became a psychosomaticist after the war, to take on a group of ministers for lectures, discussions and group therapy. Then he persuaded the Rev. Ben Wallace of Omaha’s Hanscom Park Methodist Church to help round up a group.

They called the result the Ministers’ Clinic of Nebraska. Members paid $10 a couple per meeting, and some of them drove as much as 300 miles to get there. Drs. Young and Tompkins served without pay. And doctors and clerical couples decided that the experiment was a dramatic success.

Once they got over their natural skittishness of the facts of unconscious life, informal, easygoing Bob Young found it surprisingly easy to get his clerical couples talking about their aggressions, repressions and sexual problems. Even a little theology was kicked around—with some of the inanity that is often a byproduct of the mixture of Scripture and Freud. One meeting considered the question of whether Jesus Christ was a masochist. (Yes, said Bob Young: he denied himself marriage and made his life one long bid for suffering. No, said the ministers: men crucified him because they were not yet ready for the Son of God and his principle of love.)

Mad All the Time. But for Bob Young’s ministers and their wives the psychiatric sessions have opened new vistas. “For 2½ years,” says the .Rev. James L. Ray, 29, of the First Methodist Church in Auburn, Neb. (pop. 3,422), “I worked with a church youth group, in Lincoln, and I never had one young person come in for personal counsel. Then one night I talked about what I’ve been learning these last two years—dynamic psychiatry. The next week seven young people came in for personal talks, and they’ve been coming ever since . . .” To the Rev. Walter L. Jewett of Centenary Methodist Church in Beatrice, Neb. (pop. 11,813), the group has “meant a reorientation of my entire life. Why, I used to be mad all the time—and I never realized it … I’d been preaching for 25 years, and I had no adequate idea of how to tackle the job I had to do.”

Dr. Young finds one heartening proof of success in the fact that before his work with the ministers started there was only one group of Methodist churches in Nebraska sponsoring clinics on family life, whereas today there are 27—with more starting up each month.

The ministers’ clinic, which has changed its name to the Institute of Psychology and Religion, now has a second group (largely ministers and their wives) under way with Dr. Young and the tape recorder. At their first session early this month, Bob Young brought up the question of love. “We’ve all been brought up with the idea that we give much to others,” he said. “Yet it simply isn’t so. You can’t feel another person’s feelings. There is no inter-love. Love is an intrapersonal thing.”

The room bristled. “Right now,” declared one of the ministers, “we’d say bosh.”