Psychology and Catholicism: Contested Boundaries (review)

Robert Kugelmann, a psychology professor at the University of Dallas, has written an intellectual history of the relationships between psychology and Catholicism in America from 1879 to 1965—a more circumscribed subject than his title suggests, but an authoritative history of these interactions.

Although American Catholics in psychology lack a signal figure—a Freud or Jung, or a seminal work or theory—their interactions are deep and varied. At their heart is a contest between faith and reason, between the soul and the self, which has altered everything from pastoral counseling and the confessional to marriage preparation and Catholic education. However, giving an account of these interactions is conceptually challenging, because psychology as a field has contested roots, practices, meanings, and relationships with other disciplines.

To navigate this uncertain terrain, Kugelmann identifies four broad characterizations of the interactions between psychology and religion. First, since psychology develops only from empirically tested results, it neither depends on nor challenges theological claims. Second, psychology, like all knowledge, has philosophical presuppositions that participate in and challenge theological claims, so psychology is bound, in some fashion, to philosophy and theology. Third, theological commitments precede the developments of psychology, so the only valid psychology is a confessional psychology. Fourth, religion is irrational and psychology is rational, so psychology is a replacement for both theology and faith.

In Kugelmann's account, Catholics understand the relationships between faith and psychology chiefly through one of the first two categories, either as an empirical science whose claims do not affect or depend on their faith, or as a field of knowledge whose claims, although distinct, participate in theological and philosophical claims.

After establishing these categories in the first chapter, Kugelmann develops these relationships over eight chapters that function like case histories of specific moments and movements in recent history. These densely researched and illustrated chapters draw on primary and secondary texts, magazine articles, correspondence, professional meetings, research publications, and textbooks. They are suitable to assign individually to graduate or advanced undergraduate students, especially the chapters on psychoanalysis, depth psychology, and the institutionalization of psychology. Kugelmann evinces a deep knowledge of the history of both psychology and Catholicism, which makes these chapters rewarding. He shows how Catholics develop a rapprochement with psychology around sexual morality and personhood and how the clergy and laity employ psychology. In these chapters, Kugelmann's history significantly improves on previous texts. Less successful are early chapters on modernism and neo-Scholasticism that, although accurate and detailed, are better accounted for by other historians.

In the final chapter, Kugelmann offers a constructive account for the relationship, suggesting that psychology return to the soul. In its initial development, psychology did not discuss the soul, in part to distinguish itself from theology. Kugelmann argues that it is now necessary to revisit the soul within psychology and argues for a movement analogous to ressourcement theology. He notes the development of indigenous psychologies, psychologies developed out of a particular community's practice for a particular community's account of psychological phenomena. He argues, like Henri de Lubac, for a return to sources indigenous to Catholicism—say, John Cassian on self-disclosure.

This possibility is particularly moving. In De Lubac's great work, Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man (San Francisco, 1988), he wrote that

the greater becomes one's familiarity with this immense army of witnesses, the closer one's association with this one or that, the keener is the realization of how deep is the unity in which all those meet together who, faithful to the Church, live by the same faith in the Holy Spirit.

(p. 20)

If Kugelmann can spark a similar engagement of psychology with the riches of Catholicism, this book will prove not just authoritative, but prophetic.