Medicine: Meeting of Minds

Religion, said Freud, is a universal obsessional neurosis. Psychiatry aims to cure neuroses. Last week in Manhattan, specialists in the "neurosis" and the "cure" announced the formation of a combined National Academy of Religion and Mental Health. Its aims: to promote the establishment of psychiatry departments in theological seminaries and to sponsor research in the area where religion and psychiatry seem to overlap, e.g., "What religious phenomena are pathological?"

Brushing aside Freud's dictum as a matter of semantics and logic-chopping, Academy President Kenneth Ellmaker Appel. a Philadelphia psychiatrist, set the tone for the academy's work: "A hundred million Americans [the estimated enrollment...

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