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Healing the WholeIn some parts of the West, having a psychotherapist has become the secular equivalent of having a confessor. The new priests of the mind wield tremendous influence and yet are often bitterly divided amongst themselves; psychologists against therapists, Freudian against Jungian analysts, behaviourists against geneticists and so on. The slightly perjorative term "shrinks" has, in common parlance, has come to cover them all, although in truth, the term only has relevance to psychotherapists. This is not the place to examine each discipline and its claims; rather I seek here to examine the spiritual significance of each approach in the context of Orthodox psychotherapy. The latter term may surprise the reader a little and yet it is the title of a seminal book by the great Metropolitan Hierotheos Vlachos (ISBN: 960-7070-27-5). The tradition of soul-healing, (literally: "psychotherapy"), is a thoroughly Orthodox Christian one ground in the theoria and praxis of the Desert Fathers and Mothers. Much of what we receive today as "psychotherapy" has little if any Christian content. Carl Justav Jung, the father of modern psychotherapy for example, although the son of a Lutheran pastor, was himself, (if anything), a good old fashioned gnostic. His esoteric teaching concerning the topography of the mind, (animus/anima, the "shadow" side, archetypes etc.) resonates with ancient psychic lore, with which he was both familiar and appreciative. Therefore, although Jung valued enormously religious dimension of human life, (unlike Freud who thought it a neurosis), he was as distant from the Judaeo-Christian tradition as the "old man" of psychoanalysis himself. Many Christian pastoral practitioners have tried to adapt Jung for the Church but have ended up captive to the old system. This is hardly surprising since as Metropolitan Hierotheos makes clear in his books, modern psychotherapy starts from the human side of things, not the revelatory, experience proven, God-ward side. The Desert "abbas" and "ammas", however start from a completely difference base line in their psychotherapy. Their objective in their relationships with their spiritual children was salvation, not adjustment, fulfilment or integration. They knew from the inside of their own struggles, temptations, advances and theological insights what was needful in order that a person might be saved, body, mind and spirit. They communicated with utmost discernment and discretion a "word," (or more usually a story or proverb), tailored to the need of each and every person who came their way. The authenticity of their counsel shone through their Christian humility, not from any so-called professionalism. They knew that for an individual to become a person, (note the difference!), for salvation to be attained, a great struggle had to be negotiated in which God's power and human faculties must work together in full synergistic union. Every human frailty and sin, every incremental step on the road to glory, was known to be a spiritual with a theological solution. Orthodox psychotherapy can only function, therefore, from within the Church's Living Tradition, its oral and pastoral database of living and reposed elders. The great tragedy of our age is that the western church, in neglecting its own spiritual heritage has created a vacuum in which both ignorant fundamentalist excess and secular broken promises flourish .... much as weeds flourish, mistaken for flowers. Healing the whole of us, both for Orthodox Christians and for society in general, can only become possible again when these ancient but every new sources of soul-healing are opened up by those who know what they are talking about because they have first applied it to themselves. Healing without Christ is impossible and although it is true that where there is healing there is Christ, for Orthodox Christians at the very least Christ must be explicitly at the centre of all therapies. Better put, we should say that the flourishing of the human person in community is ultimately a question of belief, a conviction that the Triune God IS our healing. Fr. Gregory |
