Abstract
If, as previously argued, claims of expertise on the child provided the major original route of contact between psychologists and religious constituencies, expertise on mental distress was soon assuming a distinct place of its own. It was in psychotherapy that Psychologists (including psychotherapists) and religious professionals came to work closest together throughout most of the last century. Mental distress had long been considered a province of medicine, and psychiatry (or proto-psychiatry) a fertile source of Psychological ideas. The Psychology/psychiatry borderline often becomes blurred when considering late nineteenth century and early twentieth century claims to scientific expertise on human nature. It was in this border zone that various forms of psychotherapy appeared around 1900, the term itself generally being traced to Swiss psychiatrist Dr Paul Dubois’ 1904 usage, Dubois’ best known English-language exposition is Dubois (1909). although two Dutch doctors, F. W. van Eeden and A. W. van Renterghem published their Clinique de Psycho-therapie Suggestive in 1889, having set up a clinic of ‘suggestive psychotherapy’ two years previously. In 1887 the English word ‘psycho-therapeutics’ had first appeared in a Contemporary Review article and in 1889, again hyphenated, in the title of C. L. Tucker’s Psycho-therapeutics or Treatment by Hypnotism and Suggestion. Numerous other early equivalent terms in German, French and Italian are given in Baldwin (1925). A mediating factor in this fusion of psychiatry and Psychology was the contemporary interest in hypnotic phenomena and the role of ‘suggestion’.
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Notes
- 1.
Dubois’ best known English-language exposition is Dubois (1909).
- 2.
Acknowledgements to Hendrika Vande Kemp for drawing these early English usages and Baldwin (1925) to my attention.
- 3.
Sanford Gifford (1998) The Emmanuel Movement: the Origins of Group Therapy and the Assault on Lay Psychotherapy.
- 4.
Perhaps the most eminent—as the old rhyme has it ‘O, I come from the town of Boston/The land of the bean and the cod/Where the Lowells speak only to Cabots/And Cabots speak only to God’. I was delighted to see this fully quoted in Nicholson (2002, p. 32)—which enabled me to slightly correct my original quotation of it from memory. G. W. Allport apparently pasted it into a notebook after going up to Harvard. See the same work passim for extensive discussion of Harvard’s Department of Social Ethics.
- 5.
For other overviews of the field, see Clebsch and Jaekle (1964) and Clinebell (1966).
- 6.
My copy of this is the 1935 ‘3rd impression’ of the 3rd edition. It was tremendously successful and influenced J. B. Priestley in writing An Inspector Calls and his other ‘time’ plays.
- 7.
One could extend this riff considerably. On the technological front, in 1920 planes, automobiles, radio, recorded music, films and mains electricity (to select the most obvious) were barely 20 years old (sometimes less) and only then at the stage of development to become available on a mass scale, this last was also true of the slightly older telephone. Even if still directly accessible only to the better-off, their presence was visible and ubiquitous and expanded almost exponentially until 1939, alongside a constant improvement in quality. Recapturing the psychological impact of this technological ‘modernist’ revolution is particularly difficult. Revolutionary though later innovations such as TV, computers and, since c. 1995, the global internet have been, the nature of their psychological impacts cannot really be compared to that of the 1920s–1930s phase. This point clearly applies to North America and mainland Europe as well as Britain.
- 8.
See Richards (2000a).
- 9.
See Richards (2000b).
- 10.
C. Barbour (1931) Sin and the New Psychology, London: George Allen & Unwin.
- 11.
Notably Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933) followed by other works later was brought together in C. G. Jung (1958) Psychology and Religion: West and East. Jung’s international rise to favour among the religious did not go entirely uncontested by the psychoanalysts. Fromm (1950), for example, argued that while Freud ‘speaks from the core of ethical religion in working for truth, brotherly love, reduction of suffering, independence and responsibility’, Jung by contrast reduces religion to a ‘psychological submission to an external power, in which truth is relative and moral responsibility undermined’ (quoting the Psychological Abstracts in the version provided by Meissner, 1961, entry 808). The journal Pastoral Psychology, in which it appeared, is generally unavailable in the U.K., certainly where I live, in Tunbridge Wells!
- 12.
The primary source on the Tavistock is Dicks (1970). On Crichton-Miller himself the biographical material is somewhat scanty, Irvine (1963) being primarily a brief account of his professional career and connections, with summaries of some of his books. This had been preceded by Hugh Crichton-Miller: A personal Memoir by his friends and family (Anon (ed.) 1961), compiled, according to Irvine, by his eldest daughter (this is unclear from the work itself) with contributions from family and friends, plus a fulsome foreword by Jung, who held him in high esteem. On the Hadfield–Weatherhead connection see Travell (1999).
- 13.
Pages 52–54 (Anon, ed. 1961) of the contribution from a former patient contains probably the fullest statement of his belief, transcribed from a personal letter.
- 14.
This is an interesting and significant collection in its own right, written primarily from an Anglican perspective and introduced by the bishop of Southwark. It is powerful evidence of how willing even the established church was, at this time, to engage with Psychology across a wide range of issues, including education and preaching.
- 15.
These were, I assume, brothers, sons of eminent Scottish psychiatrist Henry Yellowlees (d. 1921). Henry, later Sir Henry, was certainly his son, and later became chief medical officer at the Department of Health for England (see: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1459531/). However, another very prominent, Glasgow-based, psychiatrist, of the same name, David Yellowlees, is also recorded as having died in 1921, so there must be lingering doubt regarding David Yellowlees.
- 16.
Richards (2000a).
- 17.
The fullest biographical coverage is Travell (1999) Doctor of Souls. Leslie D. Weatherhead 1893–1976. A further book-length treatment is Price (1996) Faithful Uncertainty: Leslie D. Weatherhead’s Methodology of Creative Evangelism, and most informative on biographical details is his son Kingsley’s memoir (Weatherhead, 1975).
- 18.
This episode has a curiously archetypal character—an encounter between an aspirant and a wise man in the desert, in the biblically resonant ‘Mesopotamia’. That the British army’s presence in Basra was justified as a ‘liberation mission’ (from the Turks) further adds an odd, more contemporary resonance to it.
- 19.
K. Weatherhead (1975) Leslie Weatherhead. A Personal portrait, London: Hodder & Stoughton. See Tombleson (1916).
- 20.
Psychology and Life was still in print at least until 1947, that being the 16th edition.
- 21.
http:/marcusgregory.org/ includes details of his later life. He returned to Cairo in 1939 where, unable to return due to the war, he settled, continuing to practice as a psychotherapist at the Behman Hospital and being a founder of the Egyptian Association of Chartered Psychotherapists. In 1966 he returned to London, continuing to practise and research. He subsequently published Our Wonderful Psychoneural Systems (1996). This site has a rather fine photo of him in his later years, with an impressive medallion hanging from his neck and looking most distinguished.
- 22.
Reprinted as Guild Lectures No. 80 in 1954 (Jung, 1954).
- 23.
This is elsewhere spelled ‘Whitfield’; I have googled both in vain, but ‘Whitefield’ actually looks more likely, if it was named after the famous eighteenth century Methodist preacher George Whitefield, whose name was indeed pronounced ‘Whitfield’.
- 24.
Pages 183–186.
- 25.
Interestingly, a U.S. author, E. Leigh Mudge, published a similar work, Our Pupils. Psychology for Church School Leaders in 1930.
- 26.
The Student Christian Movement had been founded in 1889 and played a major role in founding the secular National Union of Students. There is what seems to be a fairly sound brief summary on Wikipedia.
- 27.
Both of these were reprinted in Jones (1923) Essays in Applied Psycho-Analysis.
- 28.
In Hendrika Vande Kemp’s opinion: ‘… truly a clinical masterpiece, probably the best material available on the schizoid condition’ (pers. comm.).
- 29.
See the chapter ‘William Kyle and the Westminster Pastoral Foundation’ in Frost (2006, pp. 103–114). This came to my notice too late to be taken into account here, but should be consulted for more detailed, and franker, coverage than Black supplies of the internal politics and debates within the WPF.
- 30.
At the time of writing, the British government is trying to reassert this distinction in order to differentiate the pay grades of counsellors (lower) and psychotherapists (higher) in the NHS. For those working in the relevant services this is patently absurd. For anyone who knows about the history of the field it is plain ignorant. The intention of course is to sideline higher paid ‘psychotherapists’ in favour of lower paid ‘counsellors’.
- 31.
See Table in Black (1991, p. 47). This is difficult to convert into current terms because even during the period in question, inflation makes 1972 figures incommensurate with 1978 ones, but it must be in the region of £ 2 million in 2009 terms.
- 32.
Given that the grand old man of English letters, Gilbert Murray, was series editor, I cannot help wondering if a certain amount of arm-twisting did not lay behind Grensted’s acceptance of the brief.
- 33.
The Christian pro-Jungian genre continued into the 1980s, e.g. Clift (1982).
- 34.
See Chap. 12 for more on Allport’s position.
- 35.
Nearly a decade earlier, W. Earl Biddle (a clinical director at Philadelphia State Hospital) had published Integration of Religion and Psychiatry (1955), reiterating on the third page of his Preface that ‘Freud’s great error lay in his lack of understanding of spirituality’. I also note from a decade before that, Landis (1946) ‘Psychotherapy and Religion’, Review of Religion, though I have not been able to consult it.
- 36.
Invoking love was not an entirely new move in psychotherapy; it figured prominently in the earlier psychoanalytic work of S. Ferenczi, Otto Rank (Ferenczi & Rank, 1925) and Stekel (1922), the latter being a book of rather slushy aphorisms.
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Richards, G. (2011). Religion and Psychotherapy. In: Psychology, Religion, and the Nature of the Soul. Library of the History of Psychological Theories. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-7173-9_7
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