The Origins Of Psychotherapy

Tom: You’re listening to Search the Scriptures Daily, a program in which we encourage everyone who desires to know God’s truth to look to God’s Word for all that is essential for salvation and living one’s life in a way that is pleasing to Him.

Our topic for this first segment of our program is Psychology in the Church, a subject we’ve been discussing for a number of weeks now. One of the reasons for our spending so much time on this topic is psychology has greatly influenced Christendom, and has been accepted by so many Christians that few question it anymore. Incredibly, some of its teachings are accepted as doctrines of the church, and that’s certainly true with things like self-esteem, self-love, and so forth, even though they are contrary to what the Word of God teaches.

Dave, last week, as you know, we were discussing men who are considered to be the pillars of psychotherapy (Sigmund Freud, Carl Rogers, Carl Jung), and we were doing that in the light of Psalm 1, particularly regarding verse 1: “Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly.” We simply gave our audience some background history of those men—for example, Freud. His theories have nothing to do with science, but were based upon his own perversions, mostly sexual. He lusted for his own mother. Again, this is according to his biographies. He was a cocaine addict, a drug which he then recommended to his colleagues to prescribe for their patients. Carl Jung, as we’ve mentioned, was suicidal throughout his life. He communed with demons and had a number of spirit guides. His idea of the collective unconscious was really a God-replacement theory…

Dave: Well, Tom, when you say these things, some people may be having a hard time believing it. These come right from official biographies, some of them autobiographical. And Carl Jung…well, as I think we mentioned, he says for several years he teetered—these are his words—teetered on the brink of total psychotic breakdown.

But anyway, he did have spirit beings guiding him. This is where some of his major theories came from.

Tom: He gives them credit. Again, Dave, this would be—what’s his book? Memories, Dreams, and Reflections? So we’re not making this up, folks!

Dave: Well, Tom, he claimed to travel with the dead, and be the parson for the dead. So, I mean, these guys are way out. And he said that his major theories, Septem Sermones Ad Mortuos (The Seven Sermons to the Dead), came from spirit entities that inspired him. And then the church is using these ideas!

Tom: Dave, again, all somebody has to do, as we’ve been saying here, is look into the history of these men. Carl Jung—talk about vile! As a youth he talks about having visions of God, and one place where “God” is defecating on a cathedral. And these are the things that influenced his spiritual outlook and so on. Over and over…his mother, for example, she was institutionalized numerous times. She had a room in her house which she kept two beds in there for visiting spirits.

Dave: Well, Tom, she grew up in a home where Jung, her father, Jung’s grandfather, he was a master Mason. He was also a Protestant minister there in Switzerland, and she, as a teenager, had to hold the spirits at bay long enough for him to write out his Sunday morning sermon.

Now, Carl Jung’s thesis for his MD degree involved séances and so forth, which he himself was involved in.

Tom: Because it was his cousin, this young 13-14 year old, who was carrying on these séances.

Dave: And his grandfather also. Now, Tom, this is going to sound far out, but this is what he says: As a child, he would meditate upon the portrait of his grandfather hanging on the wall until the grandfather stepped out of the frame, and they walked off into the woods for the grandpa to initiate him.

Tom, these people are so bad, and they are the great heroes of Christian psychologists in evangelical churches. It’s just absolutely staggering what they are passing on to their patients, and what they’re writing in their books, and what they’re preaching from the pulpit.

Tom: And these are the men who are supposed to be those that we look to solve our problems of everyday living.

Dave: Right.

Tom: Dave, I think about marriage and family counseling. You’re going to go to a Jungian analyst? You’re going to somebody—well, Freudian, it doesn’t make any difference—there are more than 500 different methods. There are 10,000 techniques, many of them in contradiction to one another. Dave, it’s absolutely crazy! It is lunacy!

Dave: And it has come in the church, and the Christian psychologists are the most popular speakers and consultants!

Tom: And the inner healers, Dave, have a whole thrust that way, and their hero is Carl Gustav Jung!

So…well, we mentioned also last week, Carl Rogers. Now, he would be somebody they’d say, “No, Carl Rogers with his humanistic approach….” Last week you quoted Bruce Narramore in terms of Carl Roger’s influence upon him.

Dave: And Abraham Maslow. Rogers was going to seminary when he decided to go into psychology.

Tom: Union Theological Seminary in New York, right. Well, we’ve got to point out, not only did he turn from the Bible at Union Theological Seminary…

Dave: Which wasn’t really into the Bible.

Tom: Right. Well, if he had any idea, it was gone by the time he was there a year or so. But we mentioned that he abandoned his cancer-stricken wife for another woman. She dies—that is, his cancer-stricken wife dies…

Dave: Because he said you have to be true to yourself. “She’s dying, so why should I be true to her? I have to be true to myself,” and he picked up another relationship.

Tom: Well, Dave, you would think that would present some guilt for him, wouldn’t you? I mean, even with all of his ideas and so on.

Dave: It might have, until he got a message from the spirit world.

Tom: Here we go again! He goes to a séance—supposedly, or he claims, that he hears from his wife, and she says, “It’s okay, Carl. No problem.”

Dave: That made him feel really good about himself.

Tom: Yeah. Dave, Abraham Maslow, the father of, along with Carl Rogers, humanistic psychology, many people know that name because if they’ve taken any psychology courses in college, or maybe even in high school, you learn about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. What does that do to the Bible?

Dave: Well, Tom, on the bottom of it—and you are more current with these things than I am. It’s years since I’ve even thought about this kind of nonsense, I’m sorry to say, so I’m just going on my memory. But the major problem is we’ve got a pyramid, and at the bottom, this is the foundation, would be your bodily needs: shelter, food, and so forth and so on. It moves up a little bit, and finally at the top…

Tom: Well, I’ll give you the other ones. The next rung would be safety, things of concern—again, it relates to your physical needs and so on. The next level would be belongingness, or love—how we interact with people, along that line. But now as we’re moving to the top, we have esteem, self-esteem, and so on—how people think about us (really more importantly how we think about ourselves), and right at the top is self-actualization.

Dave: Well, this is supposed to be the spiritual end of it, finally getting in touch with God.

Tom: Maybe even realizing that you’re “God.”

Dave: Right. Now, you’ve got it upside down, because Jesus said, “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things,” your food, your clothing, etc….in fact, Jesus introduces that statement. He said, “Don’t be anxious, saying, What shall we eat? Or what shall we drink? Or wherewithal shall we be clothed? For after all these things do the Gentiles seek. Your heavenly Father knows what you have need of, but seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these other things will be added unto you.”

So, Abraham Maslow has turned it upside down. We’re seeking ourselves first, and our own needs and what we want, and finally you might get around to God at the peak of this pyramid and realize that you’re “God.” And yet, Tom, this is in the church. Some of the finest preachers, pastors, they still are preaching self-actualization the way Abraham Maslow did it.

Now, Abraham Maslow has some interesting connections to Esalen. This is a new age center—well, spiritistic, I mean. They had a course in their catalog taught by “The Nine.” The Nine is a demonic group who claim to be God, claim to be running the universe, and in their catalog, they had a course in Gestalt therapy taught by The Nine.

Now, “The Nine” is very interesting, because Paul says, “We wrestle not against flesh and blood,” Ephesians 6, “but against principalities, powers, the rulers of the darkness of this world, spiritual wickedness in high places.” And the word there for the rulers of the darkness is—well, in Greek it’s Archon. These were the Archons, who in Paul’s day were the nine rulers of Athens. So, Paul was saying just as there is a hierarchy of rulers over Athens, so there is a hierarchy of demonic powers ruling in the darkness, anti-God and against the souls of men. And so these were the ones that Esalen, in their catalog, they had a course taught by them. And they had a young lady—what was her name, Jenny? I forget—who channeled The Nine. They’re quite famous in the occult, The Nine. In fact, anyone who wants to read Mind Invaders, you will come across The Nine, because they are still active in the spirit realm.

But anyway, he was on his way to Esalen. A number of things that he thought were supernatural occurred: the way he got there, this light in the dark, difficult road winding its way up the mountain—and there he met Stanislav Grof, who is another interesting man.

He came from Czechoslovakia, and he was really into the occult as a psychiatrist. He couldn’t get too much interest among his colleagues over there; came to America—wow! They’re all into this sort of thing. And later he married Christina Grof, and Stanislav and Christina founded the Spiritual Emergency Network, SEN. So many people were getting into…talk about weird experiences out of the body, and feelings of suicide, and so forth from the use of drugs, or yoga, or following psychological principles that they set up. Spiritual Emergency Network—they’ve got over a thousand (last I knew) psychologists, psychiatrists across the country ready to answer the phone to help them.

But they say spiritual emergencies are normal. You see, you’re on your way to growth, your spiritual growth, and so forth, and it’s normal to have some of these horrible, frightening, demonic experiences. That shows that you’re expanding your consciousness and you’re reaching toward self-actualization.

So this is where an awful lot of things have started there, and this was where some of these men met together and they would teach courses at Esalen and the Big Sur south of San Francisco. And this is where the druggies and new-agers and famous singers, you know, pop singers and so forth, would congregate.

Tom: Dave, I’m sure we’ve got some listeners, some viewers out there that think, Man, what are these guys talking about? I thought psychology was science! Well, we could take you back to the roots of psychotherapy, psychological counseling. It goes back to Mesmer; it goes back to hypnotism and so on, altered states of consciousness. We mentioned that Freud, before he got into cocaine, he was using morphine. So the elements of the occult, the elements of spiritism, were always involved in this.

Now, Dave, what many people don’t know is that there’s a cycle here. It began with the occult, and what’s the fourth stage now of psychotherapy? We had psychoanalysis, we had behaviorism, we had humanism, and now we have transpersonal psychology. What’s what that all about?

Dave: Well, it’s supposedly the spiritual realm. Tom, Association for Humanistic Psychology—we could go back and look in our files at some of the programs for some of their major, well, annual conferences, conventions. And I mean, they are into every occult practice that you could imagine!

Tom: Workshops that would just…I mean, just really unbelievable.

Dave: And yet, Tom, for all of this, I think some of our listeners will say, “Yeah, yeah, but that’s extremism. I mean, this is Christian psychology. We go to Christian psychologists.” Remember, they took the same courses, had to give the same answers on the same test to pass those tests. They had to give the same answers on the exams for licensing that all these other people have to follow, and this is where it comes from. It does not come out of the Bible!

So let me quote Bruce Narramore. You referred to him once more. Bruce Narramore was the nephew of Clyde Narramore, who was kind of a godfather of psychology in America. He said it was humanistic psychologists Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow who first made us (that is, we Christian psychologists) aware of the need for self-love and self-esteem.

So he’s simply telling you: no one, in studying the Bible for 1900 years, ever got those ideas out of there. They came from the godless, anti-Christian, humanistic psychologist, and they willingly acknowledge this.

James Dobson, he has said, “Well, Christian psychology is really a good profession for any young person, young Christian, to aspire to, so long,” and I’m quoting him, “so long as their faith is strong enough to withstand the humanism to which they will be exposed.”

Now, if you’re going to take psychology to help you counsel people from the Bible, why must you learn it from the humanists? Let’s go to God himself. One of Christ’s names: “He shall be called Wonderful, Counselor!” Let’s go to Jesus Christ. Let’s go to His Word. But they have gone to the world, and you began quoting Psalm:1:1Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful.
See All...: “Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly.” And if there were ever ungodly men, it’s these men that we’ve been referring to, and the Christian psychologists have taken their counsel from these men.

Tom: Dave, I believe in 1 Timothy 4 we’re given a prophetic insight into this. Now, I’ll have our listeners and viewers think about this for a second. First Timothy 4:1: “Now the Spirit speaketh expressly, that in the latter times (I think we’re in the latter times) some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils.”

Dave: Tom, this is apostasy. In other words, He’s not saying, “Oh, there will be some godless atheists out there who will be teaching this.” No, there are some who once professed to follow the Word of God, and they will depart from the faith, and they will give heed to “seducing spirits and doctrines of devils.”

Now, Tom, you know what Paul says in 2 Timothy 4: “The day is coming when they will not endure sound doctrine.” Now, isn’t this ironic! In the church today—I’m sorry, not just the psychologists, but it’s pretty widespread—doctrine? That’s boring stuff. Don’t give us doctrine.

Tom: Well, Dave, it’s intolerant. We need to be tolerant. Doctrine’s intolerant.

Dave: You’re right. They have turned from sound doctrine, biblical doctrine, the teachings of God’s Word, and what have they turned to? To seducing spirits and doctrines of devils. Do you mean devils have doctrines? Of course they do! A doctrine is simply the framework within which you present your ideas, your beliefs, and the Bible is the framework for the faith.

Tom: Sure, it’s God’s Word. “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the Lord.”

Dave: So now, those are being countered by doctrines of devils. And, Tom, I guess we didn’t get very far, but what we’re trying to say is look at the roots of this. Look at who these men are, who these men were who taught this. Look at the practice of it today. I could take you into a workshop in an Association for Humanistic Psychology (AHP) convention that would blow your mind. But we’ve run out of time.

Tom: Dave, we just got a letter from (I think we have it in our newsletter for March) the woman who works in the court systems, and she sees the courts turning people over to these psychotherapists, these psychologists, and so on, and she said they are destroying their lives.

Dave: Tom, we got a letter from a guy who is in prison. He has, I don’t know, a month or two, and he’s going to be released. And they require him to take a course in psychology before they will let him go. This is wicked. It’s evil, but it’s preparing the world for the Antichrist, and it is really taking over not only our society, but also our churches.