Medicine: Sin & Psychology

Sin has long been an unfashionable word in most analytic circles, but last week the American Psychological Association offered 7,000 members (jammed into Cincinnati for its annual convention) a soul-searching symposium entitled “The Role of the Concept of Sin in Psychotherapy.” Upshot: the idea of sin, at least for use .in treating the sick psyche, is making a comeback.

The University of Illinois’ famed Researcher 0. Hobart Mowrer began with vigorous kicks at the moribund body of classical Freudian theory as he defined it (many latter-day Freudians would not buy his definition). “We psychologists.” Mowrer said, “”have largely followed the Freudian doctrine that human beings become emotionally disturbed, not because of their having done anything palpably wrong, but because they instead lack insight. We have set out to oppose the forces of repression and to work for understanding. [This leads to] the discovery that the patient or client has been, in effect, too good, that he has within him impulses. especially those of lust and hostility, which he has been unnecessarily inhibiting. And health, we tell him, lies in recognizing and expressing these impulses.”

Hell on Earth. As a result, said Dr. Mowrer. “not only have we disavowed the connection between manifest misconduct and psychopathology, we have also very largely abandoned belief in right and wrong, virtue and sin.” The idea that man can have the benefits of an orderly social life, without paying for it through restraints and sacrifices, said Dr. Mowrer, is “a subversive doctrine.”

Instead of the “salvationist’s vision” of a future hell. Dr. Mowrer suggested: “There is a very tangible and very present hell on this earth. It is this—the hell of neurosis and psychosis—to which sin and unexpiated guilt lead us. If it proves true that certain forms of conduct characteristically lead to emotional instability, what better or firmer basis would one wish for labeling such conduct as destructive, self defeating, evil, sinful?”

By Freudian theory, said Dr. Mowrer scornfully, “one would expect neurotic and psychotic individuals to have led exemplary, yea saintly lives. The fact is that they typically exhibit lives that have been disorderly and dishonest in extreme degree.” And mental hospitals, he charged, are full of patients who have had insight therapy—to no avail.

Down With Blame. “I see no alternative,” said Mowrer, “but to turn again to the old, painful but also promising pos sibility that man is pre-eminently a social creature, or in theological phrase, a child of God.” Future treatment of the emotionally ill. suggested Mowrer, “will, like Alcoholics Anonymous, take guilt, confession and expiation seriously and will involve programs of action rather than mere groping for ‘insight.’ “

Manhattan Psychotherapist Albert Ellis agreed with Mowrer that Freudian insight alone is not enough to change deviant behavior. But he denied any place for a concept of sin in psychotherapy. Though he conceded that the individual must take full responsibility for his actions. Dr. Ellis insisted: “No human being should ever be blamed for anything he does.” Therapists, he argued, must rid their patients of “every possible vestige of their blaming themselves, others, or fate and the universe.” In fact, Mowrer and Ellis were not so far apart. Some of their differences were semantic. Though Dr. Ellis had ransacked dictionaries, he offered no definition of “blame” to fit his usage. He obviously meant self-blame as a continuing, nagging and. in fact, neurotic process, leading to a damaging sense of worthlessness.

Then, argued Ellis: “The more sinful and guilty a person tends to feel, the less chance there is that he will be a happy, healthy or law-abiding citizen. His sense of sin will literally drive him away from not doing wrong and toward doing it. He will become a compulsive wrongdoer.” Worse, the individual who lets self-blame run away with him cannot help blaming others, thus becoming angry and hostile. Therefore: “Blaming, in all its insidious ramifications, is the essence of virtually all emotional disturbance.”

It was a religious psychologist. Professor Charles A. Curran of Chicago’s Loyola University, who wove the conflicting concepts of sin into a medically meaningful unity. A sense of sin, he suggested, is like the sensation of pain—a warning signal for avoidance or recoil. Some children, born with no reaction to pain (TIME, Jan. 14, 1957), are grievously handicapped in life. While nobody wants to inflict pain on them, they would be healthier, happier and safer if they could feel pain. To Dr. Curran, while too keen a sense of sin may be as bad as too much pain, a proper amount of it will protect both the individual and the society he lives in.