Psychology and Catholicism: Contested Boundaries by Robert Kugelman (review)

This is an important book. After traversing several terrains in the fields of psychology, Robert Kugelmann leads the reader to a consideration that the soul can and should matter in psychology. Through astute analysis the author provides a philosophical and historical study of Catholicism's relations with psychology. The historical landscape which Kugelmann covers is between 1879 (with the issuance of Pope Leo XIII's encyclical, Aeterni Patris) and 1965 with the close of the Second Vatican Council. By means of a metaphorical matrix comprised of "boundaries," "crossings," "currencies," and "trading zones," Kugelmann navigates Catholicism's contested concerns of modernism and natural scientific psychology vis-a-vis neoscholasticism.

He describes, for example, how during the first decades of the twentieth century Catholic scholars in universities such as The Catholic University of America, Fordham University, and Saint Louis University engaged in exploring the "new psychology" and in so doing risked reverberations from the Americanist and Modernist controversies. Kugelmann considers certain issues between the "new psychology" and the Catholic tradition of rational psychology as having permeable boundaries and thus there was a free exchange or "flow of commerce," while other issues were controversial and hence had "contested boundaries."

During the first half of the twentieth century, the psychoanalytic writings of Freud and his followers represented one of Catholicism's greatest concerns. Kugelmann reveals, however, that several Catholic intellectuals and psychologists did appropriate psychoanalytic concepts into their work, among them E. Boyd Barrett and Thomas Verner Moore. At the same time, Rudolf Allers (a former student of Freud's) and Fulton Sheen vociferously challenged psychoanalysis and "Freudianism."

Kugelmann gives special consideration to the influence of Dom Thomas Verner Moore at The Catholic University of America who during the first half the twentieth century taught the first waves of Catholic counselors and educators as they ventured into the various fields of psychology. As the author describes, Moore's efforts to merge neoscholastic concepts with empirical and clinical psychology were essentially ignored by mainstream psychology. In a similar period, Kugelmann explores how the thought of Carl Jung had considerable influence on Catholic thought. He concludes a lengthy chapter highlighting the sometimes contentious correspondence between Jung and the English Dominican Victor White.

At midcentury other Catholic scholars, through phenomenology and humanistic psychology, forged a viable relationship with psychology. The philosophies of Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Merleu-Ponty are noted as are the writings of such midcentury Catholic psychologists as Magda Arnold and Adrian van Kaam.

Kugelmann saves his central thesis for the book's last chapter. In it he calls for a "ressourcement" through which the soul may find a place in in the "paradoxical" disciplines of psychology. In this respect, he seeks to guide Catholic psychologists between the Charybdis of an overreliance on scientific method which tends toward "methodalatry" and the Scylla of fideism.

Herein lies the book's concluding questions: what is the relevance of the church's two thousand year tradition for psychology? In so many words, how does the psychologist remain open to the Word of God? Kugelmann suggests that an affirmation of the soul may serve as the horizon towards which all who labor in the fields of psychology are finally bound.

While many of Kugelmann's concerns are of a historic nature, they nevertheless have contemporary relevance. Professors and graduate students of pastoral psychology and theology as well as those engaged in pastoral ministry will find this important book informative and worthwhile.