In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.
Lord, we thank you for all those who are attending the Newman lecture this evening.
We invoke the Holy Spirit upon each one.
May he enlighten and strengthen them.
May he open their hearts to his inspirations through this evening's presentation.
We invoke the presence of his Holy Spirit upon each one of us.
May he enlighten and strengthen us.
May he open our hearts to his inspirations through this evening's presentation.
We also thank you, Lord, for the gift of doctor Paul Vitz, his wife, Timmy, and their whole family.
We are grateful for all the good they have done and continue to do in the lives of each person they touch.
Finally, we thank you, Lord, for the gift of doctor Vitz's life work for the many people his books and teaching have helped, guided, and inspired through the course of the years, for the impact his work has had on the present direction of psychology and the future horizons that it opens.
May you continue to bless our speaker, doctor Kugelman, along with doctor Vitz, Timmy, their family, and all of us here participating this conference at the end of this liturgical year and for years to come.
Amen.
Now I would like to turn it over to doctor Rebecca Morse who will give an introduction to our speaker.
Hello, everyone.
Thank you for joining us.
We are so honored to welcome doctor Kugelman to Divine Mercy University again.
Doctor Kugelman is currently at the University of Dallas where he's been on faculty since 1977 in various positions and roles and culminating in the esteemed role of professor emeritus.
He's an active member in numerous professional organizations, including around the International Society for the History of the Behavioral and Social Sciences, which is where I first learned of doctor Kugelman's work.
He serves in several editorial and peer reviewer capacities for many highly competitive journals and also for well established publishers such as Rutledge and Springer, and most notably for many of our faculty and students here at DMU.
He is the recently established co editor of Integratus, the Journal of Catholic Psychotherapy Association.
He's written five books, including the upcoming twenty twenty three, The Soul and Soulless Psychology.
And he has published 82 articles and reviews and innumerable presentations.
And we are just absolutely delighted to have you with us, doctor Kogelman, and we thank you all.
Thank you.
Hello to everyone who has zoomed into this talk from wherever you are.
Thank you for being here.
I appreciate it very much.
I'm grateful to doctor Craig Titus for the faculty and administration of Divine Mercy University for this opportunity.
It is an honor and a privilege to address a few of the contributions that doctor Paul Vitz has made to psychology and its intersections with religion, philosophy, and theology.
Thank you, Paul, for all you have done.
I've heard you lecture many times over the past two decades, and I've read some of your publications.
It has been an interesting journey in preparing this talk, hoping to contribute to the work you have been doing.
At the beginning, let me tell you my conclusions that I that I I was working on this talk.
I owe these insights to Paul.
He has been engaged in the work of integration of psychology and Christian thought for decades, and these thoughts emerge as I read and consider what he has to say.
My first conclusion, the psychology to which Paul has contributed leads back to the soul.
Soul is the third thing between psychology and religion, uniting and dividing them.
Paul is now writing about the soul, and the soul takes us beyond the self.
Second conclusion.
Psychology has a religious unconscious to borrow from the name of Paul's book, Sigmund Freud's Christian unconscious.
Psychology has never been unintegrated with religion.
Following Graham Richards as well here, this proposition could be rephrased.
Psychology is entangled with religion.
You could express the relationship like this.
Psychology is in some ways like religion.
It is also true that psychology is not like religion.
In other words, in going about the work of integration or disentanglement, we are not dealing with opposites or with two fields that are mutually exclusive.
We enter a play of identity and difference.
This is too abstract, so when the time comes, I'll contextualize it.
Third conclusion.
There is a truth in self worship.
It's not simply an error like saying two plus two equals five.
The worship of self is a result of a misrecognition.
The cult of self worship arises from a confusion between myself and the Imago Dei, the image of God, at the center of myself.
I develop I will develop these conclusions, but I wanted to wanted you all to be aware of where we are going.
Next slide, please.
What do we mean by psychology?
Doctor Vitz has contributed significantly to the integrating Catholic thought with contemporary psychologists starting with his book psychology as religion, the cult of self worship.
He's been walking on dangerous ground in his quest for Christian psychology since it is precisely those approaches in psychology that he saw as attempting to replace Christianity with psychology, nevertheless promised to open nevertheless promised to open to Christian thought.
Just to be clear, when I speak about psychology, I mean psychotherapy and theory and practice.
That is psychology as we are considering it here is that psychology that addresses the stresses, sufferings, pathologies, torments, and the pains of living, loving, and working.
It shares the ground with religion, in particular Christianity, which in its care for souls seeks to heal us in this veil of tears, this dark valley, this fallen world.
Unfortunately, because both psychology and pastoral care tend to many of the say many of the ways we suffer, some people conclude that they do not need religion because psychology addresses our sufferings.
Others conclude that they do not need psychology because religion will suffice.
Paul in this book took aim at humanistic self theories that can be hostile to religion and can present psychology as the only way to find meaning in life now that religion no longer is relevant.
He singled out Carl Jung, Eric Fromm, Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow, and Ralo May as formulators of this cult of the self.
Their self theories promoted a secular search for self fulfillment and self actualization.
For many humanistic psychologists, there is little concern for explicitly religious meanings of self that is fulfilled or actualized.
This contends moreover that there's animosity towards religion among the humans.
The pursuit of self actualization reaches beyond psychology and flourishes in self help and popular psychology.
Paul points out that the boundaries between theory and popularization are vague with the humans.
The topic of popularization of self theory is a thorny one.
The life world does not passively and whole hog assimilate scientific concepts.
Social representation theory shows that they are selectively absorbed so that while the concepts may change everyday understandings of things like guilt and anxiety, the concepts themselves are changed by incorporation into a life world.
For example, French Catholics in the post World War two period took up psychoanalysis in a positive manner because it attempted to resolve conflicts among family members.
French Catholics at the same time completely ignored libido theory.
So so with the humanistic psychologist, everyday thinking took up self fulfillment but completely missed the boat on innocence, which is still a besetting defect in our national character despite warnings about it from Marlon May and others.
However, it is true that Carl Rogers reinforced our presumption of innocence in the face of evil.
This is analysis of the various forms of self worship or cult or of cultural narcissism is an important contribution.
What we find are legitimate legitimations that cultivate modern certainties such as self esteem, self fulfillment, and universal victimhood.
All shows that these popular psychologies arise in a society devoted to the golden calf or the almighty dollar.
Next slide, please.
My aim in this lecture is to locate Wits' thought in the history of psychology.
I will deal primarily with psychology as religion cult cult of self worship.
Psychology as religion is a defense of Christian psychology, a polemic as some reviewers claimed.
This book presents a sophisticated self psychology that dialectically relates to the humanistic self psychologies identified at the beginning of the book.
Locating this work in the history of psychology of the self leads us to earlier self psychologists, especially William James, Mary Witten Calkins, Harry Emerson Fosdick, Carl Jung, Gordon Allport, and Ronald May.
And Paul Viss, Paul's critique of humanistic self psychology serves the end of separating it from some of its philosophical and social presuppositions and reformulating it in Christian terms.
All is in good company in this endeavor.
Back in the eighteen nineties, Edward Aloysius Pace, a priest and a psychologist, fresh with a PhD in psychology from Wilhelm Wundt Wundt in Leipzig, became a professor of philosophy at the newly founded Catholic University of America.
There was at the time much fewer in Catholic circles over this new experimental psychology.
Two things were wrong with the new psychology according to the some Catholics.
First, it was experimental.
Psychologists study topics such as reaction time, sensory threshold, and span of attention.
Some Catholics objected.
How can the soul be studied in the laboratory?
The soul is our substantial form, not a sensory object.
Second, and even worse, this new psychology was a psychology without a soul.
Advocates of a soul soulless psychology know that psychological science must distance itself from metaphysics.
The soul was a relic of prescientific metaphysical thinking on the part with alchemy, which was chemistry with spiritual entities, and with astrology, which was astronomy with occult forces and powers.
Pace countered both criticisms.
A Thomistic thinker, he held that human beings were composed of soul and body.
He was not a Cartesian thinker, so he did not identify the soul with consciousness, and he certainly did not think that the body could function without the soul.
Pei saw nothing wrong with experimental psychology since such research is grounded in sense perception and a result of investigation is always a particular, not a universal.
Experimental psychology does not study the soul.
It studies sensation, sense memory, problem solving, and the like.
Observers as observers as the subjects of experimental psychology are often call often called were rational beings with free will, and they voluntarily participated in these studies.
Often, graduate students and their professor would take turns in the different roles in experimentation as the observer and as the researcher.
In early reports, the names of the observers would be given.
The soul was present then, but it was not the object of study.
Where psychology made a mess of things according to PACE was in interpreting their findings in terms of psychology without a soul.
Repaced, Thomas better get involved in experimental psychology or the materialist would hold the field, showing how experimentation supported their erroneous presuppositions.
Bates in the nineteen seventies faced a similar situation.
If the self is left to the selfless, their work will poison the well of the way we understand who and what we are.
These self psychologists do not under do not acknowledge the Christian claim that our relationship with the transcendent God orders our living.
This wrote, quote, an overwhelming number of selfist assume there are no in unvarying moral or interpersonal relationships.
No permanent aspects to individual.
The tendency is to give a green light to any self defined goal that is undoubtedly one of the major field of selfism.
In response, Wits has developed a Christian self psychology.
Psychology as religion, like much of his work, belongs to a tradition of explicitly Christian and Catholic psychology.
While there was much Christian psychology in the twentieth century, it is also true that Christian psychology predates the rise of modern experimental psychology.
It's customary to say that modern psychology begins around 1860 with the publication of Fechner's Elements of Psychophysics.
It is worth noting that Fechner's psychophysics was itself entangled with religion.
And in the eighteen eighties, psychotherapy began with scientific recognition of hypnosis by Jean Martin Charcot.
Our popular psychology began in the nineteenth century with Samuel Smiles' book, Self Help, published in 1859.
When did Christian psychology begin?
It depends on what you mean by psychology, or we can take the long view with Daniel Robinson.
It began with Augustine's introspection and with his Trinitarian analysis of the soul, with Aquinas and other scholastics and their analysis of the soul in relationship with the body, with Descartes, the cogito, and the idea of the infinite, with various sciences of the soul from the sixteenth to eighteenth century, in the contemporary era with Desiree Mercier in Louvain, Thomas Werner Moore in Washington, Magda Arnold in Chicago, Rudolph Auerz in a number of places, not to mention others discussed by Miesiak and Stout in their 1954 book, Catholics in Psychology.
Contributions have continued since then, including Adrian von Combs, the art of existential counseling 1966, and Charles a Curran, religious values in counseling and psychotherapy '18 1969, and Peter Tyler, the pursuit of the soul, 2016.
There is, in fact, a mighty stream of Catholic contributions to psychology over the century.
And if this is not widely known, it's probably because a positivist approach has infected the history of psychology as as it is taught.
Moreover, non Catholic Christian contributions to psychology were the past century and more abound.
Mitz's Christian self psychology belongs to an important tradition in American psychology, one that I would call James again after William James, who promoted scientific psychology, pragmatic philosophy, and pluralistic theology.
This tradition does not hold to James's conclusions, but it does hold with the range of his considerations for understanding the self.
Next slide, please.
To grasp the significance of psychology as religion as a self psychology, I propose to identify its formal cause.
Formal causality asks about the essential quality of a thing, the soul of a thing.
What makes the thing what it is?
In an important sense, here we ask about the soul of the book.
Formal causality is the tricky one of the four causes.
To get to the essence of a piece of writing, Marshall McLuhan and Eric McLuhan argue, you must discover its readership.
To whom is the writing addressed?
Psychology as religion had a broad readership in mind, quote, the reader interested in a critique of contemporary psychology, Paul wrote, but it primarily addressed Christian readership.
The reader is involved repeatedly as when this wrote, quote, in addition to the development of an intellectual critique of secularism, Christian political response is hopeful, unquote.
This political response would be, quote, the quiet but persistent, immediate but long term withdrawal of support from the anti Christian activities of the modern state, whether these emerge from the left, the right, or the middle of the road, unquote.
The book then addressed a Christian community.
He extended a hand to non Christians as well centered on individuals who share his view that, quote, there is a worldwide fundamental conflict between Christianity and the modern state, a conflict which has little to do with whether the state espouses a leftist or rightist political philosophy, unquote.
If identifying the readership means to identify the formal cause of the book, then the essence of psychology as religion is a Christian critique of modern psychology as the servant of the modern state.
Committed to nothing but economic growth, develop, integration will have to continue to grapple with that essence.
The book shows the diffusion of selfless psychology throughout our society and lifestyles of self indulgence that the presuppositions that endless economic growth is good and courageous.
Indeed, this warns us that we, the citizens of the wealthy nations, are heading for disaster, and our psychology only fuels the fires of our undoing.
Since selfism posits no value except self indulgence, it offers no basis for opposing political and economic oppression.
This wrote, quote, there's no reason intrinsic to self psych self theory that it should be associated with liberal humanist values.
Witt's argument highlights that what is at stake in the development of science of human subjectivity.
The intensity of the book arose in part from Witt's light as he told his readers at the beginning of the book, Quote, by 1968 or so, I would no longer teach graduate or undergraduate courses that required me to cover the self theorist.
Becoming a Christian provided me dramatically different view of psychology in spite of in spite of my rejection of self theory, large parts of me remain which are still thoroughly indoctrinated with it.
Particularly difficult are religious ideas like penitence, humility, accepting my dependence on God, praying for help.
Here, he pleaded with the reader.
Please, I would like to hear something that would improve my odds of obtaining salvation.
Psychology as religion is a personal document.
Such documents are not rare in the history of psychology.
Indeed, Jung wrote that every psychology is in part a subjective confession of the author.
In other words, any exploration of the psyche has a personal component.
The self explorations of Freud and Jung are examples how psychological theory has roots in the life of a psychologist.
So too is psychology as religion.
It is rooted in false conversion and a sense of where our world is going, a sense that we are living in a time of crisis.
The waning of the modern age has begun, he wrote.
Signs of the end of the modern age are, quote, the growing suspicion of science, technology, business, and government that is suspicion of objectification and the systems based upon.
Next slide, please.
Psychologies of the self are relational because the self always implies another with whom I interact.
Philosophical antecedents of self psychology are in John Locke and David Hume.
Hume found nothing in his search in his own soul.
In American psychology, we can start with William James who formulated an influential psychology of the self.
James differentiated the material cell, the social cell, and the spiritual cell.
Material self includes one's own body, possessions, family, indeed anything I can call my own.
The spiritual self, the self of selves, consists of one's mental abilities taken objectively.
The spiritual self is felt directly in acts of paying attention, for example.
It is the social self, however, that is essential for the history of self psychology we are pursuing.
For James, social self is the recognition we get from others.
He wrote this.
A man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him.
From this, there results what practically is a division of the man into several selves.
This may be a discordance splitting as one as where one is afraid to let one's one set of one of his acquaintances know him as he is elsewhere, or it may be a perfectly harmonious division of labor.
These three selves are me, and different from them all is the I, the knower, subjectivity proper.
This follows James in claiming that the, quote, objective validity of the cell as rooted in the body has been ignored even as they have shown how the social self develops in a cultural and historical context.
James kept the body at the center of the stream of consciousness so that his self psychology did not blow around in the cultural winds ungrounded.
James' self psychology had a religious dimension in our relationship with what he called the ideal or potential social self.
And he wrote this, when for motives of honor and conscience, I braved the condemnation of my own family, club, and set, when as a Protestant, I turned Catholic, as a Catholic and free thinker, I'm always inwardly strengthened in the in my course, instilled against the loss of my actual social self.
The emotion that beckons me on is in dutifully the pursuit of an ideal social self or the self that is at least worthy of approving recognition by the highest possible judging companion.
This self is the true, the intimate, the ultimate, the permanent me which I see.
This judges god, the absolute mind, the great.
It's a fundamental characteristic of Jamie and self psychology, and there's always a religious dimension to it.
James' psychology with his philosophical, theological, and scientific fringes established a strong tradition in American society in American psychology to which Mitch's psychology belongs.
Mary Whitten Calkins, an early American experimentalist and philosophical psychologist, was a student of William James.
Phyllis Wentworth writes, over the course of three decades, from the turn of the century to the late nineteen twenties, Hawkins articulated and defended a system of self psychology that held that psychology as a field to be organized as a science of the self.
For Conkins, a self psychology was important because it retained moral and religious consciousness in psychology.
Moreover, Calkins' self psychology sprang from, in quote, interest not in the study of cells in isolation, but in the study of cells living in knowledge of their interconnectedness to other human beings, through a divine being, or both.
So that, like James, found that self psychology necessitated a religious dimension in their social resistance.
Myths himself includes the work of Henry excuse me, Harry Emerson Fosdick, a liberal protestant theologian, in his history of self psychology.
Fosdick taught at the Union Theological Seminary where his work contributed to a psychologized religious culture in the nineteen thirties.
Later, this seminary became a center for post World War two emergence of the growth movement.
Following Vitz's lead, I include Fosdick in this genealogy of self psychology because as Vitz noted, these ideas about the self were popular in liberal Christian context before being widely published in the purely secular literature of psychology.
The psychology of religion that Paul examined in his book then began with religion and psychology in the decades before humanistic psychology emerged.
Fosdick was a modernist, and his opponents were the fundamentalist.
Fosdick, however, saw a significant flaw in modernism.
And he wrote in 1926.
Many a liberal preacher is so anxious to be rational that he forgets to be religious.
Religion is not created, saved, or propagated by the rationality of its thought forms.
Much as that ought to help.
Religion central and unique property is power to release faith and courage for living, to produce spiritual vitality and fruitfulness.
And by that, it ultimately stands To cap to recapture that religious property, courage for living, Fosdick looked to psychology and developed a self theory.
For Fosdick, personality lay at the heart of the gospel.
He wrote this.
Jesus's attitude towards human personality can be briefly described as always seeing people in terms of their possibilities.
He habitually looked at men in terms of what they might become.
We often do that with children, but the marvel of the master was that he did it with the most unlikely people.
He saw prodigals in far country countries, women taken in adultery, and thought of them in terms of their moral possibilities, unquote.
Indeed, Vosnik claimed that Christ's, quote, estimate of human personality, divine origin, spiritual nature, supreme value, its boundless possibilities has been rightly called his most original contribution to human thought.
Fosdick's 1943 book on being a real person developed this thought, and Vitz observed that, quote, much of his theory of personality is difficult to distinguish from those of today's psychological self theorists, especially Rogers.
Hence, the need for self acceptance and self love so that one can become a real self.
Self acceptance in the face of societal demands to be certain type of self is a hallmark of humanistic self psychology.
Fosdick got to the core of psychologized religion in his stress on the wholeness of personality as a goal in life.
And this is Fosdick again.
In modern psychological parlance, the word integration has taken the place of the religious word salvation.
No disorganized personality can be put into any situation so fortunate that by itself, it will make him happy.
While a well organized personality and in confront with astonishingly satisfying results, conditions that at first seem insurmountable.
Fosdick explained that quote process of the process of organization essential to personal wholeness always involves two elements, discrimination and renunciation.
Discrimination means that we must commit ourselves to values and aims that we deem supremely worthwhile pursuing.
Renunciation means saying no to its contradiction.
Both of these elements take positive faith to begin with.
Bostic developed his own formulation of self psychology, which contributed to the humanistic psychology movements of mid century.
Let me digress for a moment.
This observation that ideas about the self developed in religion before being developed in psychology as we see in Fosdek is really important.
It happened too earlier in the Emmanuel movement of the first decade of the twentieth century when two Episcopal priests, Elwood Worcester and Samuel McComb combined hypnosis, suggestion, and education with pastoral care of souls and called it psychotherapy.
Moreover, historical roots of psychoanalysis are in confessional practices of the church.
Recall also that some forms of psychoanalysis have been declared heretical by others, which can claim themselves to be orthodox.
Psychologists around the turn of the twentieth century borrowed spiritualist practices.
A more recent example of this kind of borrowing from religion is in mindfulness.
These occurrences point to a big issue.
The integration of psychology and religious traditions is not the bringing together of two unrelated things.
In its history, psychologies have religious elements.
Purely secular psychology is not purely secular.
Borrowing from Vitz's later book, it may be that psychology has a Christian unconscious.
The work of integration goes on all of the time because psychology and religion are related dialectically, not dichotomously.
Mitch's discussion of the new age movement is another case in point.
Following Jean Taylor, the new age movement is an example of a shadow culture in American society, a mix of psychological, spiritual, and esoteric healing practices.
It is a potent, if diffuse, integration or entanglement of psychology and religion.
Carl Jung, who was called, quote, the originator of much self therapy self, excuse me, self psychology, developed a psychology that is as religious as it is scientific.
Mistakenly understood as a breakaway follower of Freud, Jung was closer to William James and Theodore Theodore Flournoy who stressed the creative activity of the unconscious.
James studied the working of mediums.
Flournoy and Jung also studied mediumship and the upsurge of mythic forms in dreams and symptoms.
Jung developed the concept of the self with a capital s, but that self is not the self of popular self psychology.
In Jung's term, pop self psychology indulges the ego, our conscious sense of ourselves, not the self, which is the archetype of psychic wholeness, the symbols of which include us.
There is a gnostic element in Jung's work, but it is also true that there are Christian and the Catholic varieties of Jung's analytical psychology that are not egocentric or.
For example, Vera von derma.
Gordon Allport made significant contribution to self psychology.
This noted that Fosdick cited Allport's work, which supported Fosdick's emphasis on becoming and self realization.
Allport, in his 1955 book, Becoming, developed a theory of the self.
Alport introduced the term proprium to denote, quote, all the regions of our life that we regard as particularly ours and that make for inward unity.
With the proprium comes appropriate striving, which, quote, distinguishes itself from other forms of motivation.
In that, however, in that, however, beset by conflicts, makes for unification of personality.
Appropriate striving includes the pursuit of long range goals regarded as central to one's personal existence, and it always has a future reference.
Crucial to appropriate striving is.
Rejecting the psychoanalytic view that religion if the religion of of adults is a prolongation of infantile religion, Allport viewed mature religion as a, quote, comprehensive attitude whose function it is to relate the individual meaningful to the whole of being.
Allport was also a scientific psychologist, and he noted that, quote, as a science, psychology can neither prove or disprove religion's claim to truth.
It can, however, help explain why these claims are so many and so diverse.
They represent the final means achieved by unique personalities, in diverse lands and times, I quote.
Moreover, religion can show us the goal of self of the self's becoming.
Or a person is a self assertive, self critical, and self improving individual whose passion for integrity and for meaningful relation to the whole of being is his most distinctive capacity.
Allport is known for his psychology of personality, and personality was important to Allport because it alluded to the soul, through religion, through the wholeness of life.
Allport's psychology is incomprehensible without an appreciation of his Christian faith.
Finally, there was Ronald May, a Jamesian psychologist of the second half of the twentieth century, a student of Fosdick and of Paul Tillich, a great Protestant theologian.
May's chief contribution was the introduction of European existential psychology to North Americans.
During his youth, when liberal Protestant had developed a psychological perspective, May got involved in counseling, which seemed a natural extension of his religious vocation.
At that time, May, quote, emphasized the development of the individual personality along the lines of FASDA.
May even worked as a pastor in the nineteen thirties.
While later in his life, he would distance himself in Christianity, his emphasis on personality development continued.
Self actualization, understood in psychological terms, has roots in liberal protestant thought and through it in American society.
May psychology owes a great debt to this version of Christianity.
May sound in a Jamesian note by emphasizing the will.
By will, he did not mean willfulness or will power, but decision and commitment is vital to the unfolding of an individual.
For me, the work of psychotherapy centers, quote, upon the existing person and emphasizes the human being as he is emerging, becoming.
Becoming is not, however, postmodern anti essentialism.
In fact, they warned that when folk when therapy focuses on adjustment, it adjusts us to a society that is dehumanizing so that we are, quote, happy at the price of loss of being.
Significantly, in an essay, psychology and the demonic, not demonic, May wrote, I define demonic as any natural function in the individual that has the power of taking over the whole person.
Sex and eros, anger and rage, and the craving for power are examples.
The demonic can be either destructive or creative, unquote.
The demonic needs direction, hence the importance of consciousness.
May criticized Carl Rogers for his denial of the demonic, making May a fellow traveler on the path that Paul Vicks walked.
May concluded his essay on the demonic with language that, while superficially secular, resonated with the Christian tradition.
Passage illustrates the weaving together of the religious, the psychological, and self psychology.
May wrote, quote, demonic in an individual pushes him towards the logos.
That is to say, the more I come to terms with my demonic tendencies, the more I will find myself conceiving, living by a more universal structure of reality.
This logos in this way is transpersonal.
This, like May, came to stress the postmodern self the transmodern self excuse me.
The transmodern self as the way forward.
Next slide, please.
One characteristic of this Jamesian self psychology we have been tracing is this critique of modern society and psychology is dehumanizing.
In this, this takes the form as defense of Christianity in the face of a secularizing society.
But there is also his critique of economic self.
Even though some, like May, warned us about the dehumanizing characteristics of modern society, some brands of crisp of humanistic psychologists succumb to human consumerism.
Right?
Quote, the consumer society combined with natural human pride has created a psychology that is focused on the glorification of his or her own self.
Here we get to the heart.
In one sense, we should glorify the self is if it is properly understood.
Human self is made in the image and likeness of god.
So to see oneself as it is is to see reflected the glory of the creator.
Instead, we worship the golden cow of consumerism.
And in what we could call with Lacan and Macron and Sons, a misrecognition, we look in the mirror of consumer economy consumerist economy and see ourselves flattered and pampered as little gods who can demand anything and anyone.
Instead of beholding the with them, we find the ego and confuse the two.
Psychotherapy, after all, is a social institution, an economic one at that, and so tempted by and so tempted by consumerism.
C b MacPherson called the kind of self that developed in the modern age, the possessive individual, a person who owns his or herself and only establishes contractual relations with others.
Possessive individualism runs a mock in society, though having a population devoted to self fulfillment is economic good news.
It gives credence to Bernard Mandeville's eighteenth century maxim that private vice is public virtue.
Unexamined biases are a danger of a set for a self psychology.
Economic presuppositions may be the most important.
My reference to Mandeville's book, the fable of the bees, was to indicate that selfless psychology has deep roots in convention in contemporary society.
This observed that, quote, the material success of the contemporary economy underlies many of the assumptions which emerge in the selfless writing, unquote.
He singled out Carl Rogers believed that the economy will keep on growing.
And as it does so, marriage and family and other precapitalist relationships will fall by the wayside.
The possessive individual owes nothing to society, and traditional social arrangements can be negotiated and revised based on the belief that relationships are contracts.
This quoted from Carl Rogers' book, Becoming Partners, Marriage and Its Alternatives.
Quote, this is from Rogers.
Marriage and the nuclear family constitute a failing institution.
We need laboratories, experiments, attempts to avoid repeating past failure.
This suggests that we consider, quote, intelligent and increasingly influential economic argument for a return to a simpler and less industrial society made by the Christian economist EF Schumacher.
This proposal was made by contrast with the selfist.
Their psychology is dependent on, quote, the last stages of late in industrial urban economy, which is now which has already begun to collapse.
It's right.
Moreover, self isms or advocate advocacy of experience now and not inhibiting our repression was a boon to the advertising industry, unquote.
Instead of liberating us from repressive social norms and roles, selfism enslaves us for de repression and instant gratification.
All that liberation takes money or better yet, credit.
Next slide, please.
Let's discuss the postmodern views of Kenneth Gergen and Philip Cushman who have described the emptiness of the modern self.
Both Bergen and Cushman draw upon James' social self.
Given that the focus is on the social self, Bergen correctly diagnosed our condition as the saturated self.
Because the number of groups to which we belong and from whom we get recognition have proliferated with technological changes.
For example, before the telephone, a person could not have had the experience of being with someone else in an immediate sense who was not an embodied presence.
Social relationships had been always with somebody.
With the telephone, I am only with a voice.
Moreover, from 1876, the phone appeared, the present, social media, emails, text messages, Zoom calls, and the like.
How many social selves do I have now?
Bits following Gergen writes that we, quote, we have a self without a center created by a huge variety of interactions with different groups and environments.
We experience a fluid and unfixed identity.
The modern self, autonomous, rational, aloof from the flesh has collapsed, says Cushman.
There is no meaning to it all.
This proposes as a solution to postmodern, a transmodern self, which he developed after 1977.
In psychology of religion, it described the dialectical development in three stages of the transcendent self.
In stage one, self, early human development, is undifferentiated from the object, the mother, and so the other is differentiated from the self.
In stage two, the growing self comes to see more and more of the world as its object, the self becoming Faustian in that object objectification of the world gives the self a kind of power over the world.
The power exemplifies exemplified a natural scientific knowing.
Eventually, even the modern even the self becomes an object for itself, and here we have the beginning of the breakdown of this modern self.
Stage three is a reversal.
Quote, the only way out is to lose this self, to let it go, and once more willingly become an object again, an object in the love and service of god, unquote.
This is the transcendent self or the transmodern self, a self beyond itself.
This transcendent self is not autonomous, not self actualized, not self determined, not independent.
It is definitely not okay.
Transcendent self recognizes that it is known more than it is knowing, more loved than loving.
To desire to be an object seems a paradoxical one for herself that is understood to have the world as its object.
However, this call to be an object derives from the psychology of Saint Augustine.
We differentiated the light by which we see from the light by which we are seen.
For this, transcendence of the self happens, quote, with preparation of mind and will, transcendent awareness of god's love and will is pass and and will and it's possible by god's grace.
Indeed, in closing the book, it's observed that, quote, search for the transcendence of the self is now firmly begun.
Next slide, please.
While the self may have had problematic relations with transcendence, the soul seeks the transcendence transcendence.
When the term soul was dropped from psychology, what term replaced it?
For many, it was the self.
So it makes sense that to keep transcendent in mind, psychology needs a return to the soul.
In recent years, that's what Paul has been doing.
His path to the concept of the self has led to that of the soul.
Back in 1998, in the review of the book called reclaiming the soul by Jeffrey Boyd, this suggested some topics to consider if we mean to bring soul back into psychology.
Pay attention to the moral light.
Remember our capacity for self transcendence through loving others through reflection on one's own life as well as cultivating the interior life.
This this wrote recently, quote, the meta model has reintroduced the soul into psychology and along with it, transcendent spiritual, quote.
In contributions to a Catholic Christian meta model of the person elsewhere, Gritz has been cultivating soul making in psychology.
His focus has been on the soul as formal cause of human life, on the distinctively human aspects are of our aliveness.
This term soul means, quote, the animating spiritual form of the human body.
The soul which he compares to a code such as the DNA code, quote, animates and structures the material aspects of the body and integrates those bodily processes with human consciousness and our spiritual cape capacities with human consciousness.
He, unquote, he compares the soul to a musical performance in which, quote, the nonmaterial higher level conceptual understanding of the piece that's embodied through the performance, unquote.
The performance being an instance of mind body unity.
At the heart of his advocacy of the soul is the following.
Quote, a perfect spiritual code or or soul exists at a transcendent level, and it both animates and structures the form of our body, unquote.
One can imagine our empiricist colleagues in psychology rolling their eyes and hearing this and objecting that the statement is not an empirical one.
How could it be falsified?
Uh-huh, comes the reply.
The question assumes that Vince is talking about efficient causality.
How is this alleged soul a stimulus for some bodily movement?
The statement is about formal causality.
Of course, what we look for is not a stimulus, but a pattern.
Let me put it in other terms.
Sowell gives us a different way of looking at what appears.
Here with this formulaization, we see someone telling a therapist about a life event, and Soule is brought in with the question, what is the spiritual essence of this action or of this narrative?
I do not mean in a pollyannish, high in the sky way because, remember our friend, Rolomei, spiritual essence may be a struggle with the individual's daimon for good or ill.
Looking through the soul means asking about the musical performance underway in human act experience.
In other words, to borrow a phrase from James Hillman, soul is a perspective upon things, not a thing in itself.
Soul is not one of the phenomena, not a what at all.
Vitz told us that the soul, quote, exists at a transcendent level.
A transcendent level is an opening upon the all, placing us at the same time in the world and out of the world.
Among the things that soul attunes us are these human actions, which Vitz and Titus enumerate, reason and will, human self consciousness, language, moral agency, and responsibility.
Soul, moreover, attunes us to our immortal destiny since soul directs our attention to our life with god here and here at.
Above all, soul, as part of our way of looking, throws our attention to the fact that every client, patient, colleague, student, teacher, family member, homeless person living under a bridge is one of the immortals.
Bearing that in mind is a gift of the soul.
Next slide, please.
Paul has been doing the hard work of integration with his colleagues here at Divine Mercy University.
May have published the fruits of that labor in Catholic Christian meta model of the human person.
Paul's earlier work, especially psychology as religion, establishes his place his place in the history of psychology.
In particular, his place stands with the following conclusion of this exploration this evening.
So I'm gonna return to my conclusions.
Vitz has developed a self psychology in the Jamesian tradition.
It's self psychology, however, leads us to the soul.
The soul is the third thing between psychology and religion, uniting and dividing them.
Those experiences that implicate soul and psychology implicated in religion, human rationality, moral choice, will, suffering, love, devotion, deprivation, and sacrifice.
Psychology and religion share this common ground, and soul is the lynch lynch lynch in between them.
Second conclusion, psychology has a religious unconscious.
Psychology has never been unintegrated with the In going about the work of integration or disentanglement, we need to see how this has been going on unwittingly.
Integration needs to be done on a conscious level.
Psychology as religion is a good start in that direction.
We need to investigate the genealogy of the work of integration.
To do so, psychology can turn to the Christian intellectual tradition and find fresh perspectives on psychological topics, dare to learn from the past.
And finally, our third conclusion, There is a truth to self worship.
Psychology can promote self worship only because the self reflects the handy handiwork of the creator.
The worship of the self is the result of misrecognition.
I confuse my ego in the imago dei, the image of God at the center of myself.
In desiring self fulfillment in consumerist terms, I see a wholeness where there is emptiness.
I miss the real I miss that the real object of my desire cannot be bought.
Self worship is insatiable because its object always escapes.
Thank you.
Thank you for that presentation.
I'm I'm I'm I'm very grateful and awed by someone as, you know, historically sophisticated and so so, accomplished even addressing the topic of what what my work might mean.
And so I'm, first, I'd just like to thank you very, very much, Bob, for for what you said.
And also, that one of the things that which I'm sure you noticed and were polite enough not to point out, I didn't have a good historical understanding of what I was doing when I was doing some of my early writings.
So that connecting it to James, I missed that.
I or I didn't know it one or the other.
And you didn't you you mentioned that that's where my approach belongs and that you're quite correct.
And I thank you for that for that education that you've given me there.
Well, you know, likewise, Paul, it was it was a real learning experience spending this all this time with books.
You know, at first, I had the first edition.
Then it hurts to me at some point, well, I better get the second one.
It's already changed.
I changed somewhat in the second one.
I did.
You changed you changed yeah.
It's, second edition is, is, I mean, they're both very good.
I really like the second edition.
I was a little more I I saw some more positive things in some of my opponents by that time.
And, so that and I think psychology now has is on the right track, frankly, and it's this conceptual center.
I think with the the understanding of redemptive narrative therapy, the understanding of forgiveness and psychotherapy, the understanding of the importance of the virtues.
It's beginning to knock on the door of really understanding the notion of the transcendent self.
This one.
And and, of course, I look forward to your masterpiece, which is in press coming out shortly on psychology, well, on psychology as a soulless science, soulless discipline.
A whole book on it.
So that that's I recommend everybody here if you really wanna know probably what the capstone would be, read read Bob Fogelman's new book.
Well, in fact, I just got the, proofs today.
I have to spend the next couple of weeks go proofreading.
Good luck on all of that.
It's Yeah.
That's always been tedious.
I know that.
One of the things I wanted to mention that is that in my critique of the self psychologist, particularly somebody like Carl Rogers, who actually complained that, he had a very good marriage, actually, and but his wife was dying of cancer near the end of her her life, and he he complained about whether he he would not be able to self actualize because he'd have to spend so much time with her.
And, that wasn't I mean, it was in print.
But what what I'm trying the point I'm trying to make is that a lot of American psychology and American culture emphasizes the isolated self, the self without relationships with others.
And that's what I was critiquing in part when I was critiquing the the autonomous self who was just like the, you know, the independent American, the self made man type of notion.
Mhmm.
You think you're a self made man, go back and talk to your mother who who took care of you during all of those non self made years when you were needing diaper changes and food and all the rest of it.
But, but psychology has recovered from that absence of emphasis on the interpersonal.
It was there in the '70s and '60s more.
And now, they do recognize the importance of the interpersonal.
So, that's part of their recovery, along with the other things that I mentioned, like virtues and forgiveness and so forth.
Yeah.
And I think you're I think I agree with you.
I think there's a lot a lot good going on in psychology these days.
Yes.
And the only problem now that I have with psychology is a lot of these good things aren't getting out into the popular culture.
The popular culture is still lagging back with the consumer self and all of that.
But sooner or later, the virtues will finally get into the theories of education and even forgiveness will get into standard psychotherapy training.
Yeah.
And I have noticed in recent years, there's much more interest in work of integration psychology and religion.
Yes.
I mean, I I've been impressed with the I mean, I'm a newcomer to the Catholic Psychotherapy Association with this journal, but I I've been impressed with the, how many people are involved with it.
Yes.
All over the country and beyond with the borders too as well.
Yes.
It's happening all over sort of spontaneously.
And it's Yeah.
That's why I think finally its moment is here and we're going to see something really very remarkable, unexpected, and I think positive emerge from it.
And I'm looking for some of that in your book.
The positive, remarkable emergent sense.
Yeah.
But, so it was I think I I summarized the relationship with the consumer psychology by quoting the Burger King theory of personality, which is have it your way.
Some of us remember when that was an expression used by Burger King to advertise That's right.
That's right.
Have it your way or you're the boss or, you know, whatever, that type of thing.
But, I think we're slowly getting past that.
I think we're getting past I think there's an emerging development that's really quite quite convincing.
Yeah.
You know, one of the things that we're reading, what you wrote in 1977 about larger society and it's, I forgot the exact wording, but it's skepticism with regards to science.
What?
It's you you talked about the, and I can't I probably can't find it now.
I thought you were, way ahead of the curve on that.
About skepticism and some about science?
Yeah.
That there's a growing skepticism towards science and It's developed really rapidly in the last five years, which was way after I wrote those.
Right.
You you say that in 1977.
Yeah.
And I was I was I didn't have that much to go on then.
But now with the COVID stuff and science is turning out to be sort of like a hired gun, you know, it'll find what you pay it to find.
That's especially true in biological and psychological sciences.
You can't do that in physics.
People don't care too much about the behaviors of different subatomic particles in terms of, you know, whether it will pay off for them or not.
But physics is still, I think, very pretty, pretty solid.
But Yeah.
But, although even there, they're beginning to ask, maybe we need a a form of physics that doesn't require experimental support.
Well, that's some of them are arguing that we should have a osmology of of interpretive convincingness, but without necessarily any data.
Well, you know, it's it's, postmodernism has seeped into the everyday culture, hasn't it?
Yes.
And that's part of the skepticism about science.
Sometimes it's not deserved, but sometimes it is because science has begun to not in particularly science in biology and in psychology, where there's so many under other variables that aren't controlled whenever you run a single experiment.
So you don't know whether COVID is gonna cause, you know, you know, people not to be able to have children in the future.
No one's testing that very much.
But there are all these other variables they're not testing as long as they get some evidence that one variable does seem to have a positive or a negative effect.
But they don't test all the others that are involved.
The same thing in psychology.
And it's very hard, therefore, to do good science because there's so many other potentially relevant variables that could be accounting for it.
And we're beginning to understand that, and and they and and in biology and in psychology, we can't live off the reputation of physics.
Right.
But, anyway, that seems to be going on today.
But, who knows?
There's good things and bad things going on.
We'll see what happens.
At my age, I don't have to worry about that.
So other people will have to worry about it.
Well, I'm encouraged by the increasing acceptance of qualitative research methods in psychology.
And Yes, I forgot to mention that.
That's a good point also of the improvement in psychology along with positive psychology and understanding the spiritual is important, understanding interpersonal relations are important, and understanding virtues.
Qualitative research.
There's another this is all part of psychology's becoming older and wiser.
Finally, And and, of course, some of us had a glimmer of that earlier than others, but the field is eventually, I believe, incorporating things that are going to set it up for, you know, the psychology of the soul.
Can I ask you something?
Yeah.
You talk about in in the in the in the beginning of the book, you talk about how you couldn't teach self psychologist anymore.
This is back in the late sixties, I take it.
Yes.
Did you get a lot of pushback from colleagues?
No.
Most of my colleagues that were there were experimental psychologists or physiological psychologists or cognitive psychologists.
And they considered this sort of enthusiasm for Rogierian self psychology that they were slightly embarrassed by it Mhmm.
Because it wasn't really scientific.
Mhmm.
And they didn't wanna say anything about it.
So when I said I couldn't find it being valid, I didn't get much pushback.
One reason at, that I was at NYU, thanks to Providence, NYU, New York University, the faculty is all over the place there.
It's not a collegial place.
It you know, it and and not being collegial, there wasn't much interpersonal pressure because you didn't know each other outside of just the the the university setting.
Some of them people lived in Massachusetts, others Long Island, some in New Jersey, a few lived downtown there near the university, which is where I live.
So but your personal lives were all separated.
And because of that, they didn't bother me that much.
They required me to publish.
They didn't like what I was publishing.
But, as long as I kept active, they kept, you know, my my raises weren't high, but they would support me.
Here here I thought all the faculty, psychology faculty were meeting in Washington Square Park and having coffee every day.
And and then throwing bricks at me or something.
No.
They didn't do that.
They were, they weren't friendly about it, but they were not in any significant way hostile.
That's good.
Yes.
So that's I don't wanna pretend that I was some sort of outcast who suffered through years of rejection.
It was the loneliness and the isolation, but not the criticism.
The loneliness and isolation was somewhat difficult, but I didn't have that much isolation because we had six kids Oh.
In a small apartment on the 23rd Right.
On the 23rd Floor.
Oh my.
In Manhattan?
In Manhattan down to in the village.
Oh gosh.
Yeah.
We're in Greenwich Village on Bleecker Street.
Oh my.
And my wife was terrific.
She was terrific.
She was also a professor there in French, you know, the French French literature.
Well, I probably walked by your apartment because I went to school and and I went to Manhattan College.
Oh.
And going to the village was always a big deal.
You know?
Well, that's where I I lived in the village for forty seven years.
But anyway, I'm optimistic about where psychology can move to and can develop.
And I hope other people can see ways to move it that way.
Exactly how, I don't know.
But I think the soul is, as your book is focused on, would be a great place for many people to start because that's the supernatural component that has to be admitted into psychology.
And once you do it, you also admit you're no longer in the empirical in the business of empirical testing.
But the idea that everything has to be empirically tested is just an assumption, an assumption that is now often even controversial other places.
So, if you can be reasonable and rational and sensible and makes intelligent sense out of it, that's important.
And that's what's for example, there's an institute in Rome called the Expanded Reason Institute.
And that institute was set up by Cardinal Ratzinger, now then Pope Benedict the sixteenth.
And what he really wants to do is to bring reason back to its significant contribution to the intellectual life and not have it just reduced to empirical, reductionistic science.
And so that I think that's really important.
And, and I see other signs of the notion that we're going to expand and the notion of integration.
As long as we don't see integration in psychology as the form of salvation.
Mhmm.
Right.
It's not ours.
Integration can be an intellectual, very rich thing, but our salvation comes you you don't have to be smart to go to heaven.
I think the smarter you are, then maybe you you have a liability, sort of like being rich.
Yeah.
Anyway Yeah.
One of the things from my perspective, of course, one of the things I I hope to see is that is that as psychology begins to reconsider the soul again, it'll it'll look to its own past and draw some of the riches that have been forgotten within one hundred and fifty years.
Look.
That's one of the things about that that's one of the things I wanna underline and and, again, is your book and your essay here.
I don't I don't know about the book yet, The Soul, but your essay here, so put this set of questions in the history of psychology and of the intellectual life, that's a major contribution.
But, you know, that is, you know, that's a big idea that can suddenly enrich the environment of what people are going to be reading and thinking about.
And it'll become commonplace that is people will say, well, you know, we we can cite, the best part of, say, of Augustine, Saint Augustine or we can by the way, the first theorist of the unconscious was Saint Paul When he said, why is it that we do what we don't want to do and and don't do what we want to?
He was on the defense mechanisms and things like that implicitly.
Right there.
And it took how many more years before anyway, but your book, by putting it in the context of the history of psychology itself, especially because of and I have the personal fondness for William James.
But but but for all of them that you brought in, one was PACE, wasn't it?
Yes.
I didn't know of him at all.
I what what excuse for education do I have if I didn't know about Pace at all?
Ace is a really interesting fellow.
He was one of the first members of the American Psychological Association.
Really?
He wasn't a charter member, but I think he got elected into the APA the second year.
Wow.
And, yeah, he did.
He's from Florida.
He's an American, and he studied with.
He was, in Paris studying physiology, and then he was in a bookstore and he came across a book by.
Said, oh, I wanna study with this guy.
And he and he went to He went over to Germany to do that.
Yeah.
He he he, yeah, he he got permission from his order to do that, or he was I think he may have been a diocesan.
But, anyway, he was at Catholic u.
He did some experimentation, so he had it he he earned his street cred that way.
He also became, editor of the Catholic Encyclopedia, and he was I think he was founding editor of the New Scholasticism and the American Catholic Philosophical Association.
Wow.
He he's a really he never wrote kinda like his magnum opus on psychology, But there's a lot of good stuff available.
Right?
Thank you.
Thank you for letting me know about him and doing all the rest of that historical work because that's a real contribution for other people now as you've laid out different lines of reading, investigation, finding earlier ways of saying things that today might suddenly seem very innovative.
So thank you.
Oh, you're welcome.
First one is, do you think that Martin Seligman's positive psychology has further opened the door to the discussion of the role of religion and emphasizes emphasizing meaning in his b e r m a qualities, not as a full discussion of the inner life, but as acknowledgment of its importance.
I wonder what you and doctor Palfetz think of Seligman in this context of integration.
Well, I I would cite him as somebody who has opened the door that way.
He's explicitly said that it's not for psychology to talk about which virtues are more worthwhile or what the goal of them is and so forth.
He said that's up to philosophers and theologians, so he's actually opened the door explicitly.
Mhmm.
Yeah.
I I think he's done a made an important contribution You can talk about virtue and character and psychology again.
Yes.
And he's tried to he's tried to do it in a way that, is scientific Yes.
Unlike some of the early humanistic psychologists who kind of rejected scientific approach altogether.
Right.
No.
So I think I think Seligman is is important.
Let me see.
Go to the next let me look at the next question here.
I wonder how you view Viktor Frankl's work in logotherapy in this context.
He was talking of the will to meaning as the secularist promoted self theory.
I was thinking of the Rogerian context of selfless psychology, which Frankl critiqued in his book, the unheard cry for meaning.
Frankl and Rogers were almost contemporaries.
They they were more than almost contemporaries.
They were contemporaries.
Yes.
They were contemporaries.
Yes.
Yeah.
And in fact, Frankl came to The US on a number of occasions.
I don't know if if he if he if he knew how personally he knew Carl Rogers, but very likely.
Yeah.
Franco is really important.
Yes.
Especially, he there's more depth in his work and because of his his own experiences of suffering, he saw a positive role for suffering in one's life.
Not that it it's it's always a good thing, but it it's one can still find some meaning even in suffering.
I mean, to to me, that's been important.
When you when you can't work, when you're isolated from all your loved ones as he was in the in the concentration camps, there's still a possibility of coming to find some meaning or significance in your life.
Yes.
He when he was in this country, he said one thing that The US needs is probably they should put up a statue in the San Francisco Harbor, a statute of responsibility as a as a cons as the, if you will, as the, as the compliment of the Statue Of Liberty.
Statue of responsibility.
As he learned here, we meant by freedom, freedom from anything, not not freedom for anything.
Right.
But he was a very he's a precursor of a lot of the things that, have been discussed tonight by both, by both doctor Kugelman and myself.
Yeah.
He really he really has a place in this story.
Yes.
Let me say something.
Oh, yeah.
Even before World War two, he was involved in, suicide prevention.
Who was?
A young psych as a young psychiatrist.
Frankl?
Yes.
Wow.
Okay.
I don't I I think he was working with adolescents, if I'm not mistaken.
I didn't know that.
Yeah.
He he was he was another product of Vienna.
Vienna had many important psychologists in the twentieth century.
He's one of them.
Yeah.
The three great ones were Freud, Adler, and Frankl.
Right.
Let's see see what the next question is here.
In your lecture, you said something like formal cause is a tricky one.
Can you please say more about this description?
Yeah.
I've gotten really interested in formal causality.
Of, you know, Aristotle talked about four causes, efficient, formal, material, and final.
Mostly sign in the natural sciences, they're interested in questions of efficient causality, cause and effect relationships as it were.
But, formal causality has to do with essence.
And it's I was really taken by the what the the McLuhans proposed.
And if you wanna find the formal cause of a of a of a book or an article or something or or an advertisement even, You look to its audience.
So it's it got me thinking about when when one is writing or doing anything along those lines, one has either clearly or vaguely some idea of who is this this writing is addressed to, for whom are you doing it.
This is not happening it it may be happening in isolation, but it's still it it's happening with somebody or some people in mind.
And so and that's and that and if you have that reader that you're addressing, and that is the context in which you produce the work.
So the work is ultimately what the reader then gets.
And so that the, the effect, in some respect, comes before the cause in formal causality.
For example, in politics, the formal cause of an of a politician's words can often be the desire to get the votes of the audience.
Oh, yeah.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
So it it's it's it's it's different it's tricky in that way.
But I think and if we're gonna be talking about the soul and psychology, work needs to be done on formal causality.
Final causality too.
So what's the goal, the purpose, the end in mind?
But, formal causality is important because we tend to think of the soul as a stimulus.
We tend to think of it if if if we think of it at all, think of it as a stimulus, and then it doesn't make any sense.
So to think of it in terms of of form, which is how many people over the centuries have thought of it, I think is is really important.
That make sense?
Let me see.
I don't know if any of Your answer was fine by me.
Okay.
And by politicians.
Yeah.
Let's see.
Oh, here's here's one here's a new one.
You spoke about psychology, trying to study things Christians attribute to the soul.
Do you think in the future we will find things that cannot be attributed to a biological thing?
If so, how will it affect psychology?
Well, if you're Thomistic, there's always there's always an element of the body that's involved.
However, we are we're not confined to the biological level.
For for for, Aquinas, it's it's the case that when we are thinking rationally, we are doing something that transcends the the body altogether because what you what thinking deals with concepts which are not material.
So, yes, we will be think we'll we'll we will be finding things that cannot be attributed to a biological thing because we're not simply, biological beings.
We're also cultural, spiritual, social beings, if you will.
And all of those have to be taken into consideration.
Yes.
And one way of thinking about it is that our is that the human mind transcends the mind of, say, animals.
Yes.
And that that transcendence means that we're qualitatively capable of mental operations that are distinctly different from animals.
And second, that those qualitative that our consciousness is not necessarily at all physical per se.
And if you wanna think about it even further, because we've experienced transcendence from the animal world, we see animals as having a lower level than we're we're we've transcended them and we're unique.
And that that and if you think of that as a nonphysical consciousness, as the transcendent consciousness is transcend is spiritual, we can also imagine another transcendence, which is higher than our own.
And we get hints of that in the lives of mystics and people with near death experiences.
And the thing that comes out of that is they say they cannot even speak about what it was that they experienced.
It's as though they've so transcended our our own understanding, which is already transcendent, they've gone to another level of transcendence, which cannot even be expressed in our at our level.
Right?
So these are nonphysical.
Both the spiritual transcendence of the mystic and the normal human consciousness, which seems to be unique to all humans.
And it's nonphysical.
Right.
This is what, you know, Hayes saying that Thomas need to get involved in experimental psychology.
Otherwise, the materials will run amok with it.
We have the same situation today with physicalism being default metaphysics, if you will, of much of psychology.
Yes.
So you in in that way, you lose anything transcendent.
Yes.
Material.
Yes.
So, yeah, that that's that's an that's an important part of this.
Would our brains still show spiritual experiences?
The college scientists at the Yale University have honored the exact spot in the human being which activates when people experience spirituality.
You know, one of the things I found out in when I was working on the book on the soul was that one of the substitutes for the soul, maybe the most important one, is the brain Because people will will say things like my brain thought.
Your brain doesn't think.
You think.
You use your brain, but it's the person who thinks.
And I think that's that's the important counter to a kind of, reduction to the brain as The implicit physical cause of everything.
Yeah.
I mean, no doubt in spiritual experiences, the brain is act the brain is active in every kind of experience, scientific, artistic, social, you name it.
But that doesn't mean that that's all that it is.
Yes.
If you if you wanna get a an early wonderful count of or this argument that that that this opens up is is in is in William James' Varieties of Religious Experience where he talked about how just because some people that have religious experiences are psychopathological.
They have some kind of disorder.
It doesn't mean that religious experience is pathological.
Right.
It may it may be because some people that have scientific insights are also suffering from psychopathology.
But we wouldn't say, well, all that all sciences is a result of the brain.
So that that's also the case with with religious experience.
So, yeah, it's important to understand the contributions that the brain makes to our our psychological life.
But it's not the be all and end all.
It's not the only thing.
I I've always been encouraged by the work of people like, oh, what's his name?
Alexander Lauria and, the the, the British neurologist wrote the man who is Oliver Sacks.
In order to understand Oliver Sacks.
Right.
Yes.
Oliver Sacks.
In order to understand the brain, you have to understand what the person is doing.
That's from Oliver Sacks.
And there also is evidence that by stimulating the brain, all kinds of things that we you'd only certain things get stimulated, memories and things of that kind.
But you don't have intellectual concepts.
You don't have a crisis of mathematics.
You don't have many of the higher level things that we that are purely mental do not Right.
Be capable of being stored in the brain or elicited by stimulation of the brain.
Right.
But this is the basic issue.
Over and over again, when we argue for the soul, we'll be arguing that the brain, although it may be involved in some modest or significant way, is not the whole story that there is more that we expand reason beyond the material.
Mhmm.
Well, here's the comment I wanted to get to.
I think Christian psychology has been going on longer than you said.
It went to John Cassian and his mentor, Vagrius.
What do you think?
Oh, yeah.
Cassian is great.
Cassian was a contemporary of Augustine, but I I think Cassian's introspection, his his analysis of the the eight flaws, which included, sadia is is first rate stuff.
And Evagrius is good as well.
All all of those there there's the the desert fathers and mothers have an important place in the history of of the psychology that we're trying to do.
I also would recommend twelfth century Cistercians, Bernard of Clairvaux.
Yes.
Example on on pride and humility, all root of Revaux, spiritual friendship.
They they had a wonderful understanding of of love.
Their their analysis of love is just is really important.
So that's that's another high highlight high spot in the in the history of of Christian psychology.
I came across something that's also relevant.
Many of you know that cognitive behavioral psychology was sort of seen as a form of was interpreted as a form of stoicism, you know, modern form of it.
But we got some a young man searching for his name now, Kent, could we come up with it?
He had a dissertation on what the stoics actually, what what they actually taught.
And the all those most of the popular stoics had a theology.
Mhmm.
That was part of it.
And that's during the time of, you know, the third, fourth, you know, the probably from around sec two centuries BC to three or four centuries, after the birth of Christ.
So the Stoics had a theology involved in their, psychology.
Yes.
Yeah.
Stoicism is really interesting, form of ancient thought because it was explicitly therapeutic.
Yes.
And so a a lot of a lot I think a lot of, good recurrent psychology owes a lot to the stoics.
And they did have a they did have a they did effect they did have a, an impact on, cash and slot, for example.
Yeah.
Okay.
Let's see.
Are there other questions here?
Could you offer what you think is the best intro book to self psychology?
Good question.
It depends on which self psychology you wanna say.
I I would start with Vince's book, Psychology is Religion, for example.
One, that would be a great book to start with.
Sure.
Go out and buy it then.
Yeah.
Get the second edition.
Get the second edition, and I'll make 45¢ on that.
I also think that you could, anything by Raoul Omay.
I think of of of those selfless from the mid cent mid twentieth century, Raoul Omay is really, important.
There's a new bio there's a new biography of Raoul Omay.
Just came out last year, which is which is a wonderful look into his life and work.
He's a very complex character.
But, and then if you really wanna go to get to the good stuff, read the two essays that he wrote in the in the book Existence in 1958, which was an introduction of experiment of, excuse me, existential psychology to to North Americans.
And, May's contributions are the clearest.
You really had a gift for speak writing in a way that people could understand.
And, so and but that that book also contains other people that are important.
So of of the of the self psychologist, I think the existential psychologists are the most important.
Right.
Maybe maybe a book by Frankl then.
I don't know.
Frankl, man's search for meaning, of course Yeah.
Is is really good.
And I and I also, strongly recommend anything by Adrienne Van Camp, especially, the art of existential counseling, which I think is is is an important contribution.
So, anyway so, Paul, did you have any other you wanted to recommend?
I no.
I well, maybe something by Viktor Frankl.
Yeah.
But, that's the existential self notion.
But you might even wanna read some critiques of of Carl Rogers and people like that who were more extreme and and and I think somewhat simple minded about what they thought of as the self.
Yeah.
But that's all I have to say on on where you'd get your introduction.
Yeah.
You should read my book.
That's right.
Let's see.
I was wondering in a practical way how practitioners can apply this work, rejection of selfism, with clients to help them understand themselves.
What might this look like with non Christian clients who don't hold the same values same view of values and virtue.
I'm not I'm not a therapist, so I don't have a a fund of great insights to offer you there.
But, you know, the the with as I understand it, you always start with where people are and and let the and let them show you the way that they need to go.
That that's my my comment on that one.
I guess I would say that, always let them know that from your perspective, all all people have great worth.
You don't need to tell them it's because they're made in the image of God.
But that everyone's self in that sense is a part of the image of God.
The problem is they have to find what I call better than self worship, more like a form of truthful self acceptance, which means love or, you know, most Christianity assumes self love, you know, love your neighbor as yourself, or we we look after ourself.
In the scriptures, they'll talk about a a husband should look after his wife as though he's part of himself.
They mean the same thing of in terms of self love is a natural phenomenon that we should always, then apply to others and then to God.
But so they want to expand love from just on the self to, not that that's wrong, but to to put it onto the other and onto God.
Mhmm.
You don't have to say put it onto God for the non believing client, but on to others.
Yes.
Self gift is a very important idea that's a secular that is capable of a secular, understanding.
Yeah.
One of our predecessors in the twentieth century was Thomas Werner Moore, who succeeded, pace as in the psychology department at Catholic U.
And, he, you know, he of course, religion was important to him.
Moore was a priest.
He founded a Benedictine Abbey in in Washington DC in the mid twenties.
He was he was a psychologist, and he he's also a psychiatrist.
He he had the whole whole but he talked about you know?
He said somebody once asked me, how do you how do you introduce religion into therapy?
And and his response was, if it's important to the patient, you introduce it.
You don't force it on you.
You have to you have to, be true to yourself, but also be you wanna keep them, open to where where they need to go.
There's an important example of that taking place now, at Harvard, University, in at least at, McLean Hospital.
There's a Jewish therapist there who just got he was a cognitive behavioral therapist, David Ross Marin.
And, he found that when he introduced the theological issues that were Jewish to his Jewish patients, they got better, faster, and and, in a way better.
When he brought in the whatever their theological understanding was, it was often so so important to them that to bring it into the therapy was very important.
And and he has now published several books advocating this as a way of facilitating mental health in patients and therapy.
I did not I did not.
I don't know his work.
That's very interesting.
Yeah.
And and the fact that he was Jewish and the fact that it was at Harvard, we're both all good for it being accepted in a way, if you will.
Mhmm.
Yeah.
I guess well, one final question.
Yeah.
It says, atheism is on the rise.
Is this because sin is not called sin but is a psychological condition?
Well, sin is is a theological category.
It would be it would be very interesting.
I mean, it maybe is being done.
I just don't know about it.
But to look and see how sin would be, taken up in an in an in a project integrating psychology and and religious life.
I know Karl Meninger, or was it Meninger had a what what had a book, whatever happened to sin, and I think that's that's an important question.
One of the well, to to go refer back to what I what I said in the talk, when May talks about the demonic, he doesn't call it sin, but, it would be easy, I think, to look at what he's saying there and then look at it theologically as he's talking about the role of sin in the life.
But, for for him, the the demonic is neutral, morally speaking.
It can be a force for good, but it can also be a force for And and, anyway, that that's that might be a way to begin dialogue about sin in psychological terms.
I have two comments.
One is I've shown in a number of a lot of different cases that atheists were strongly influenced by bad or negative fathers or nonexistent fathers.
Mhmm.
And, of course, that's on the growth now as family disintegration and things like that are more and more common.
And second, I was an atheist, so pray for the atheist.
Maybe people were praying for me that I didn't know, and that's really the biggest cause.
But I was an atheist until I was roughly about the age of 40.
And so, certainly, as an experimental psychologist, I was an atheist, and so was my wife.
We got married as two atheists in 1969.
Wow.
So there's always hope even for us.
I'm glad you were here.
Well, I'm glad you were there.
I think we're about finished with the time here for now.
I think so.
I don't know I don't know how many people have been with us, but whoever you are out there in Zoom land, thank you for your your presence.
And if you have any questions that I can answer afterwards, like, through email emailing or or whatever, please let me know.
I'd be glad to, talk with you.
And I say the same thing.
Thank you for your presence, for your participation.
And, if you have questions further than when we've covered, an email is welcome.
Absolutely.
And, again, fine.
Thank you, Paul.
I I appreciate all you've done.
Well, thank you.
You put in a magnificent amount of time, Bob.
And so now as they say, adios.
And, you know, that means to God.
Yeah.
That's right.
Goodbye used to mean that.
God be with you.
Goodbye got shortened to goodbye.
So God be with you.
God be with you.