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Psychiatry’s Resistance, An Interview 45
Dr. A: I feel that faith has to do with one’s own personal inner exploration, but I don’t think it has anything to do with clinical psychiatry as I use it. It doesn’t seem related to my clinical practice.
S: Faith implies a sense of hope—a feeling of optimism about the future. It would seem to be an essential part of a successful treatment.
Dr. A: We are tripping over the word “faith.” You are using it as a kind of optimism toward the treatment process. But I see religious faith as not always being hopeful or positive. It can be frightening or it can be, in the Old Testament sense, very restricting. It involves the acceptance of the irrational as an important part of life, and there is a danger in the attitude of believing, “because I have faith,” and not, “because it makes sense.”
S: I agree that some people may use this attitude to avoid taking responsibility for making their own decisions. But surely that’s not to say that the attitude of faith is never to be trusted—that it is a primitive reaction that is always inappropriate in any and all situations. Because there are many sophisticated thinkers— philosophers and scientists—who conclude that the mind cannot totally grasp the world in its entirety, and, like the spiritually oriented, feel that our deepest insights about the meaning of our existence are grasped intuitively and through the experience of love— not by means of the intellect. I think this is where many scientific and technologically oriented people feel resistant to spirituality—when the intellectual mind as ultimate authority is challenged.
I’d like to change direction because we may be getting a bit too cerebral. What do you suppose would happen if you met someone who was clearly at a higher level of consciousness—who had the power to materialize objects and heal people, who demonstrated boundless clairvoyance and saintly love and was in a perpetual state of bliss. How would you feel if he told you that spirituality and psychiatry were very much related and that spirituality’s view of reality was more profound and all-encompassing than psychiatry’s?
Dr. A: I don’t know how to answer that because, I have never met such a person. You are telling me about something that doesn’t register—I don’t react to it—I don’t know what it means. Perhaps I’m not capable of responding to anyone in this way. I assume that you have had an experience with such a person. Yet I can’t understand it. I can’t empathize with you—which has happened with me occasion-