Can Psychology Be Christian?

Tom: If you’re a first-time listener, you have joined us in an ongoing discussion of Dave Hunt’s book Occult Invasion: The Subtle Seduction of the World and Church. For the last couple of weeks, we’ve been talking about the various ways and means occultism – that is, methods and techniques which are akin to magic and witchcraft – it’s how this occultism has entered the Christian churches and organizations.

Dave, as we pointed out in The Seduction of Christianity, and you certainly underscore in Occult Invasion, whereas most Christians recognize and reject occultism in its obvious forms, many seem to buy into it when it’s not so obvious. And we have seen that to be particularly true of those who consider themselves to be conservative evangelical Christians. Now, I’m thinking of the occultism which comes through Christian psychology and ministries of inner healing, for example.

But before we go over our concerns about Christian psychology, I think it would be helpful if we went over some of the fundamental problems with psychology. Dave, psychology claims to be a science, which it is not, but even if it were a bedrock science, its chief subject, mankind, is not the stuff of science. In other words, man, whose makeup consists of body, mind, and spirit, is beyond the scope of science. Now that’s a tough one for prideful humanity to admit, but it is no less true, isn’t it?

Dave: Well, you can even say that the body is beyond this because of the complexity of a cell, the smallest unit of life. You can have 10,000 chemical reactions going on at once. I mean, we haven’t even begun to understand that…

Tom: So with regard to the body, we’re talking about ultimately…

Dave: …but when we get to the soul, to the spirit, as you said – the mind, human behavior, motivations, the ability to love or hate, to conceive of conceptual ideas and to communicate them in language – you can’t turn this into a science. You can’t make a science out of human behavior when the subject of your experiment is hopping about capriciously with a free will and you don’t know what he’s going to do next. So that was one of the mistakes. Freud, of course, behavioristic psychology, tried to treat a human being like an animal. And they would study the behavior, you know – the salivating of Pavlov’s dog or whatever, and the behavior of chimpanzees – and then they’d try to apply that to human beings and so forth. You cannot make a science out of human behavior. In fact, as you know, they had a study. It was cosponsored by the American Psychological Association and the National Science Foundation. They had 80 scholars, as I recall. They spent about three years studying this, whether psychology could be a science or not, and they said it is not and it cannot be. Now, it’s very easy then to move into the occult and try to make it scientific.

Tom: Mm-hmm. Dave, you know, I used the biblical perspective that our makeup is body, mind, and spirit. Well, the body has a physical and chemical makeup, so to a great degree, you can understand it scientifically. But what science do we have of spirit? What science do we have of the mind, which is nonphysical?

Dave: Well, we don’t have any. And yet, as Carl Jung said, psychology is the study – attempt to find the knowledge about the psuché, the soul, the psyche. And he said, “We don’t know what the soul is!” But this is what we are dealing with: you cannot treat man as a materialistic stimulus-response mechanism. They have tried, and it doesn’t work. I have thoughts that are not physical. You cannot say that every thought that I have is the result of some experience that I’ve had, and I’m just the sum total of my experiences. I’m…like Pavlov’s dog again, my experiences have schooled me in making conditioned responses. That’s not true, and that has been pretty much abandoned by most psychologists, although a residue of this lingers in psychology. The whole idea – Freud has been discredited. The man was a fraud. His experiments were not scientific, and in fact, he was not honest as to even who was the subject of his experiments. But we still have the idea of psychic determinism and the unconscious, that we have been pretty much determined by our early experiences, and that’s the basis of most psychotherapy today. But it isn’t true.

But now, when you move into this, then you try to regress people back into their early childhood with hypnotic techniques, and to relive these experiments – and this has come into the church, as well – then you have moved into the occult, because hypnosis is an occult technique. It’s been used by the witch doctors for thousands of years, and you can even get someone – you can regress them not only into the womb…rebirthing began to do that, so we regress them into the womb because some of the traumas that they had (coming out of the birth canal and so forth), even that has influenced them. And what do you know? We regress a person back, and they come out with factual data of what the doctor said, what the nurse had said, and so forth. We say, “Wow! Why, they have a memory of that, and you see it’s influencing them!”

However, the medical fact is that the myelin sheathing in the brain of the prenatal, natal, and early postnatal infant is not sufficiently developed to carry memories. So where are these memories coming from? They’re not coming from the brain. They are not actual memories. And now you can go beyond that and you can regress them back through the womb into prior lives, and they come out with factual data of a little village that they lived in in India in the 5th century AD or BC, even, and they can tell you the path – describe the path that the women walked down to the water where they washed their clothes, and they can tell you, you know, factual data about this little village. They’ve never been there, so that caused many materialistic psychologists and psychiatrists to begin to believe in… Even Russian Soviet psychiatrists had what they called “reincarnation therapy.” Well, you’re not reincarnating a body. Bodies die! So there must be some kind of an entity, a soul or spirit, that carries on even after the death of the body, and they said it reincarnates and so forth.

So it was psychology itself that began to open the door. As they couldn’t solve these problems medically and physically, then they began to probe deeper and they moved into the occult, and they began to believe in reincarnation and all kinds of spirit entities out there. Carl Jung, as you know, had his own spirit guide. In fact, his MD thesis was written on occult phenomena. And if I can find the quote here, Nandor Fodor, who has done a lot of writing in this area – listen to what he says – I’m quoting him now: “The discussion of C. G. Jung’s psychic participation must begin with taking a deep breath. It is a story so unbelievable that ever since it was fully revealed, analytic psychologists have been staggering under the impact. Psychoanalysts have ignored it as a fairytale, and parapsychologists have found it a diet so rich that up to now, they’ve not been able to digest it.”

Jung’s doctoral thesis of 1899 was on “On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena.” And as you know, Carl Jung said when he had a difficult case, he would consult an astrologist! He would consult the zodiac for his patients. You know that he picked up his own spirit guide. There was a period of six years when Carl Jung said he teetered on the brink of total psychotic collapse, and he was visited by the “Holy Ghost,” he said, in the form of a dove. And he picked up his own spirit guide Philemon – “Philemon the demon,” I call him. He said, “We walked up and down the garden together arm in arm. He was as real to me as…” This was his guru, and many of his theories that he later passed on (and that are even in the church of Jesus Christ today through Christian psychologists) he got from Philemon, his spirit guide!

Then he tells us also that on one occasion, a screeching chorus of ghosts came from Jerusalem and filled his home there outside of Zurich – I’ve been over there visiting the C. G. Jung Institute and so forth – and it was under their inspiration in three days and three nights that he wrote his major work Septem Sermones Ad Mortuos, the “Seven Sermons to the Dead.” He thought he was the pastor to the dead, that he was traveling with the spirits of the dead. I mean, when you study Carl Jung, who has influenced the church far more than Freud ever did, I mean, the man was an occultist. His father was an occultist. His grandfather was a master Mason and a spirit medium, and his mother was involved in the same thing. He described his mother as a loving woman by day, like an animal at night. He used to meditate upon the portrait of his grandfather that hung on the wall, and Carl Jung as a boy would sit there and look at this until his grandfather – now this is from his autobiography! I’m not making this up – until his grandfather stepped out of the frame, and they would walk off together into the woods for their initiation. This man was heavily into the occult, and his inspiration and his theories came from the spirit world, from the occult. They are not biblical, of course, and this is psychology. And when you get to the conventions of the AHP – Association…yeah?

Tom: Dave, before you…that’s really – we want to get to that. But just to pull back a little bit, some people who are listening to this may be shocked by what they’re hearing, because they never thought of psychology, psychotherapy, in the terms that we’re laying it out. But if you look at the major streams of psychology, beginning with Freud and psychoanalysis to Skinner and behavioral psychology, then you move into humanistic psychology, then into transpersonal psychology. My point here is that we move from Freud’s medical model trying to say that…Well, “mental health,” for example: now there’s a misnomer, a contradiction in terms. “Mental” is nonphysical.

Dave: A mind must be distinguished from the brain.

Tom: Right.

Dave: I like the way the Bobgans put it: they say it’s the difference between “issues and tissues.” One is physical…or nonphysical, the other is physical.

Tom: Right. So we start out with Freud, basically, and he really imposes a medical model on something that’s not true. But then as you look at the other streams, they’ve moved away from a physical concept…

Dave: As the whole scientific world has.

Tom: Right.

Dave: They pretty much recognize that this physical universe is not all there is. There is a nonphysical world beyond, okay? And it’s inhabited by spirit entities. They recognize this.

Okay…

Tom: So we move all the way to transpersonal psychology. Now, what is that? That’s a pseudoscience of the spirit. It’s really spiritual psychology.

Dave: Gets you into yoga, and mediumistic trances and everything.

Tom: Mm-hmm. So my point here is people should not be surprised that this had occult foundations and beginnings, because that’s where it is today, and for the most part, most therapies have to do with some kind of occult methodology or technique.

Dave: Well, if you’re going to regress a person back in the past, that’s what you’re involved in. How are you going to go back? I mean, and some psychologists have written some wonderful treatises about memory. You have, for example, the state of California – I think they were the first, then it was followed by Arizona, by Maryland, and I think most of the states now have outlawed testimony in court by a person who has been hypnotized with regard to the subject of the case that they’re discussing. The reason for that is, and we don’t have time to go into it, but they discovered that false memories can be created under hypnosis. Bernard Diamond, for example, one of the top experts, a psychiatrist and one of the experts on hypnosis, in the California Law Review he answered a number of questions. One of the questions was, “Can you prevent the introduction of false information when you hypnotize a person and you are questioning them with regard to some prior event?” He said, “No, you cannot, no matter how hard you try.” And in fact, he said that, finally, any person who has been hypnotized has lost any hope of knowing what really happened if they’ve been regressed – supposedly regressed back into this prior event into the past. And yet this is the basis of most psychotherapy, the basis of a lot of Christian psychology… Many Christian psychologists hypnotize their patients. You don’t even have to call it hypnosis when you’re regressing them back.

And then you mentioned inner healing: you get back into inner healing, and we’re leading a whole group of people to visualize themselves in a beautiful landscape, and go back into the past, and so forth.

So, Tom, we’re just not bringing this out of left field, but this is recognized by all those who have done any investigation of psychotherapy and psychology.

Tom: Right. Now, if people are still hanging in there with the idea that psychology, particularly psychotherapy, is basically scientific, Dave, I want to look at the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.

Dave: Right.

Tom: Now here is…

Dave: That’s the bible of the psychiatrist.

Tom: Well, why is it the bible?

Dave: The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of mental problems that supposedly arise…

Tom: You mean, if I have a problem and I want to make sure it’s a legitimate problem, that’s the book I go to to see if it’s listed by these authorities?

Dave: Right. And as to how you come up with that…

Tom: Right. Well, that’s…

Dave: …they vote on it. It’s not scientific at all. Anyway, I’m sorry, I’m interrupting you, Tom.

Tom: No, but that’s what I’m leading to. This is not something that a particular mental disease wasn’t entered in there because of years and years of study; that’s the way it works. These men – psychiatrists, psychologists – basically vote on what they believe ought to be listed as a mental illness. You…just one example – I don’t even know if I can pronounce this correctly, I don’t know who can – but it’s “drapetomania.”

Dave: Drapetomania, mm-hmm. Right.

Tom: But…now, is that a mental disease? Explain that one.

Dave: Well, the psychiatrist recognized that as a very serious mental disorder that was cured by the Civil War. The symptoms of drapetomania – by the way, it only attacked slaves – the symptom was an overwhelming urge to escape the plantation! Can you imagine? That was once seriously diagnosed as a mental illness, and it was cured by the Civil War.

Tom: Now, Dave, that’s just one example, but it’s not the – it’s not the most outrageous, nor is it the most ridiculous.

Dave: Let me quote one psychologist, Tom, who attended a hearing: this was DSM3R (which means “revised”; they’re going to revise the third revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual). And listen to what he said: “The low level of intellectual effort was shocking.” Now, this is not you or me, Tom. This is not critics. This is a man who believes in his field, and he went there with high hopes, and this is what he says: “Diagnoses were developed by majority vote on the level we would use to choose a restaurant. ‘You feel like Italian, I feel like Chinese, so let’s go to a cafeteria.’ Then it’s typed into the computer. It may reflect on our naïveté, but it was our belief that there would be an attempt to look at things scientifically.”

Okay, we’re kind of pulling the rug out from under this, but let me quote Lawrence LeShan who, at the time he made this statement, he was president of the [(correction) Association for Humanistic Psychology]. He said, “Psychotherapy will be known as the hoax of the 20^th century.”

We could quote all kinds of tests, all kinds of authors – for example, the famous Cambridge Summerville Youth Study, you remember that? It involved 650 underprivileged boys 6-10 years of age. They were divided equally into two groups. The follow up 30 years later – amazing! They thought they were going to really prove something. They did, but not what they thought they would prove. Thirty years later they had a follow up (well, they had a number of follow ups, but I’m going to the 30-years-later one): it revealed that those who received therapy had more problems. See, half of the group got therapy, and all the advantages they could give them. The other group didn’t. And the group that got the therapy had more problems with alcoholism, mental illness, job dissatisfaction, and stress-related diseases, and committed significantly more serious crimes than those who were not given the supposed benefits of psychological counseling. So any scientific evidence – and they’ve been reluctant to give scientific tests – but any time you have scientifically evaluated psychotherapy, I’m sorry, it has proven to be not beneficial, but even harmful.

Tom: Dave, our concern here is not just the occultism that’s inherent within psychotherapy…

Dave: That is a big concern.

Tom: It is a big concern, but…and we recognize that these people are trying to help people for the most part. These are concerns of psychotherapists, psychologists – they sincerely want to help people.

Dave: Unfortunately, they’ve thrown God out of the formula.

Tom: That’s right.

Dave: That’s the problem.

Tom: Not only that, but it doesn’t just lead to occultism, it leads to problems upon problems. For example, the statistical manual that we just referred to, it started out there were basically, you know, I think around 175 particular mental…

Dave: One hundred and twelve…

Tom: One hundred and twelve, all right.

Dave: …the first one. Before that they had even less. I’m older than you are, Tom, and I remember when people were either crazy or sane. That was it.

Tom: All right, how many do they have today?

Dave: They’ve got over…about 400.

Tom: Four hundred. And the problems, as I said, it just seems to be proliferating…

Dave: We keep inventing… Either we are in an explosion of mental illnesses, or they keep inventing new ones…

Tom: Right.

Dave: …and that’s the case.

Tom: Because they vote on them.

Dave: Right.

Tom: And some of these are…

Dave: Ridiculous.

Tom: …and politically correct. For example, homosexuality was considered to be – it was in the Statistical Manual as a mental illness some years ago.

Dave: Aberrant behavior, definitely.

Tom: Is it in there today?

Dave: No, they voted it out. And when they voted it out, the homosexual lobby was outside threatening to pull the plug and turn off all the electricity if they didn’t vote in the right way. Little bit of pressure was applied there.

Tom: Right. So once again, the point here is this is not science. This is the perspective of man from man’s worldview. It’s the best he can come up with.

Dave: Hundreds of rival theories, several thousand therapies, and they contradict one another. It is not scientific, and whichever one you put your trust in, there is another one – there are hundreds of others that oppose it.

Tom: Right. Now, we can’t get into it now, we’re about out of time, but the point of laying this out is that the Christian church is into this bigtime. My point at the beginning of the program was that they are opting for this to solve the problems of the church, and in the process, they are getting into the methodologies and techniques which foundationally are occultic, and that’s our concern.

Dave: Tom, let me just say – look, some people are maybe angry with us, or think we’re prejudiced. Here’s Robert M. Dawes – he’s a professor of the Carnegie Mellon University. He’s a professor, a psychologist. In anger he wrote a book titled House of Cards: Psychology and Psychotherapy Built on Myth. So, I mean, we could cite – we’re out of time – we could cite many others – secular psychiatrists and psychologists who have been exposing the foundation of cards that their own profession is built upon. And I think that should be something that people know and understand and seriously consider.

Tom: Right. Now, here’s the option: the option for the Christian is to buy into this, or integrate it within his biblical worldview, or reject it and turn to the Word of God for his needs in this area.

Dave: The “Manufacturer’s handbook.”

Tom: Right, it’s the difference between the truth or a lie.