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44 SPIRIT AND THE MIND
psychiatry. I just accept them as things I can’t understand although they interest me as a person.
S: Does religion have anything to do with psychiatry?
Dr. A: It has a lot to do with me as a person but nothing to do with me as a psychiatrist, I guess—or very little.
S: Why should that be?
Dr. A: I guess that 1 see psychiatry as a clinical specialty which tries to help people with disordered behavior to function better, and people who are not highly disordered to learn something about themselves. When one reaches the so-called normal point, one is finished with psychiatry. Psychiatry brings a person from minus to zero. To go from zero to plus you’d use another method.
S: So you see a separation between the fields of psychiatry and religion: there is no interrelationship?
Dr. A: Yes.
S: Do you think that this is a commonly held belief in psychiatry? Dr. A: I don’t know.
S: Is it something that you have thought about a lot?
Dr. A: Not a great deal. I have speculated about it just as part of
being human and wondering about the world, but not in a clinical sense—not in the sense of trying to relate my psychiatric knowledge to religion.
S: Why do you think that you and perhaps many psychiatrists don’t consider how psychiatry relates to spirituality?
Dr. A: I suppose everybody tries a little but finds it unprofitable. I know that I did. Other people may find some profit in investigating a relationship and so pursue it; I just couldn’t do anything with it. It became too much a change in my thinking style. So I kept the two fields separate.
S: You said that at one point you did try to relate the two. Just how did you try?
Dr. A: Well—I’ve reacted to the naive religionists who say things like: “If this person only had faith he wouldn’t have mental illness.” I don’t think that that’s true. Religious people have as much mental illness as anyone else. It seems that faith is neither causative nor curative. I assume it is not related.
S: This inner state called “faith” hasn’t been clearly defined by psychiatry—so how do we know what we’re talking about?