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WEB 4 - ARCHIVE
Commentary 12 - Page 4 |
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AN INTROSPECTIVE SCIENCE WITH EXACT CRITERIA The early church possessed a sophisticated psychological science that was very different from most medical psychology, although it came closer to modern developmental psychology. In fact, the aim of modern psychology is often very different from the Christian therapeutic method, whose primary aim could be regarded technically - in modern terms - as developmental. But in fact, it is developmental and therapeutic, in the sense that only more complete development restores human beings to their fundamentally good nature. When we speak about therapy as developmental, we speak about particular kinds of therapy, and in this case about a psycho-spiritual process almost forgotten in the West: at first it is psychological, but it can lead not only to solving certain of life’s problems, but also to a spiritual awakening. The claim would be that only this kind of developmental psychology brings someone back to what they should be, what many of the early fathers called our ‘natural’ condition or state. To approach it first from the psychological viewpoint, we need to overcome certain difficulties. The first of these is the difficulty people today have in understanding that a full spiritual life is prevented by the unfinished state of our psyche. In order to develop spiritually we first need to understand our own psychology and its natural impulses toward spirituality. Both modern religion and modern psychology have tended to ignore the fact that many individuals are naturally drawn to understand these inner processes and express these normally suppressed components of their nature. It was P. D. Ouspensky who made the point that medical psychology was at one time known as 'abnormal psychology,’ because it seeks to make human beings into people that are 'normal' in terms of their type and the community in which they live. As he and others have remarked, this may often be in direct contradiction to the aim of allowing them to reach their full potential. By defining its aim in this way, 20th Century psychology became unable to respond to the suppressed inner needs of individuals, and since these suppressed inner needs are part of our true potential, so that to restore people to 'normal' generally involves further suppression, the restoration of 'normality ' is often the reinstatement of the disease. This is why medical psychology is often known as abnormal psychology. |
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