THE FAILURE OF THE THERAPEUTIC:

Who can heal a guilty conscience?: Despite efforts to reduce conscience to conditioning, guilt persists, and science is powerless before it. (Aaron Kheriaty, 25 March 2010, MercatorNet)

This mention of sin brings me to my closing remarks. Regarding questions of conscience, the psychological and medical sciences clearly have their limits. I want to conclude with a few words on what is perhaps the most significant limit. The language of therapy – of psychiatry and clinical psychology – has often replaced the language of morality and religion in the modern world. Philip Rieff dubbed this, “the triumph of the therapeutic.” But a therapeutic approach to human problems – helpful as it sometimes is – has its limitations. Therapy or medicine cannot cure our deepest disorder, which is the problem of guilt, the problem of sin.

There is a prevalent denial of sin today, a denial often amplified by the triumph of a therapeutic mentality. Rather than liberating us from the guilt of sin by keeping the conscience in a state of invincible ignorance, such widespread denial only serves to augment our anguish and unhappiness. To put it plainly, the therapeutic mentality has often served to obscure, rather than illuminate, the precepts of the natural law written on every human heart.

And so I conclude by turning from psychology to literature – specifically, to drama, which has plumbed the depths of the human psyche more profoundly than any clinician or scientific researcher. T.S. Eliot explored the psychology of conscience in his play, The Cocktail Party.(15) One character, a young woman named Celia Copleston, is having an affair with a married man. When she suddenly realizes emptiness of this relationship, her life is shaken profoundly. One could say that beneath the rubble of her culturally-influenced character deformations, her conscience still operated – veiled and disguised, yet not quiescent. Like many people today, in her distress she turns to physician for advice. There’s something not quite right, she tells him:

“I should really like to think there’s something wrong with me –
Because, if there isn’t, there’s something wrong
Or at least, very different from what it seemed to be,
With the world itself – and that’s so much more frightening!
That would be terrible. So I’d rather believe
There is something wrong with me, that could be put right.”

She tries to name her disorder. It is not simply that she has violated some norm, but that she has failed in something more personal and perhaps more relational. She has an inchoate sense that she has fallen short in regards to something (or someone) outside of her self. These dim intuitions seem to run contrary to the conventional bourgeois ideas and values she was raised with and taught to embrace. And yet, beneath her internalized social conventions, there is a persistent anamnesis – a remembrance or recollection of something or someone else that calls to her. Finally, after floundering, she comes up with the only diagnosis she can think of to explain her symptoms:

Celia: “It sounds ridiculous—but the only word for it
That I can find, is a sense of sin.”
Doctor: “You suffer from a sense of sin, Miss Copleston? That is most unusual.”
Celia: “It seemed to me abnormal…
My bringing up was pretty conventional –
I had always been taught to disbelieve in sin.
Oh, I don’t mean that it was never mentioned!
But anything wrong from our point of view,
Was either bad form, or was psychological.
… And yet I can’t find any other word for it.
It must be some kind of hallucination;
Yet, at the same time, I’m frightened by the fear
That it might be more real than anything I believed in.”
Doctor: “What is more real than anything you believed in?”
Celia: “It’s not the feeling of anything I’ve ever done,
Which I might get away from, or of anything in me I could get rid of –
but of emptiness, of failure
Towards someone, or something, outside of myself;
And I feel I must… atone – is that the word?
Can you treat a patient for such a state of mind?”

The answer of course is no. Freud himself recognized these limits, when he said, “It would be absurd for me to say to a patient, ‘I forgive you your sins’.” The psychotherapist has no power to do this.

According to its Greek root, the word “psychiatrist” literally means, “doctor of the soul”. And yet, the psychiatrist has no cure for this greatest of all psychological maladies – the problem of sin. If he is astute, he can perhaps define and describe guilt; but he can in no way cure the guilty conscience. All of our human attempts to do so, whether by psychological defense strategies, medical ministrations, or therapeutic techniques, ultimately prove insufficient. But we need not despair. For our own failures suggest to us what faith has already revealed: that, in the last analysis, there is only one true and effective Doctor of the soul.