(9 of 10)
It is a measure of psychiatry's maturity as well as its penetration that religion, slowly and within stoutly defined limits, has come to accept and even to cooperate with it. Sigmund Freud, an atheist, found no place in his vision of the riddle of man for the "mass obsessional neurosis" called religion, except for its occasional help as an opiate to stifle a neurosis. For all his own scruples, he deplored society's religion-based concept of morality, saw the root of modern man's problems in the concept of sin.
Declared the Bulletin of the Catholic Clergy of Rome in 1952: "It is difficult to consider free of mortal sin anyone who uses psychoanalysis as a method of cure or who submits to such a cure." Forthwith, Pope Pius XII took pains to correct the Bulletin, and added that with certain stiff reservations, e.g., no encouragement of the idea that there can be sin without subjective guilt, psychoanalysis is a legitimate method of treatment. Protestant and Jewish faiths have lent their support to joint enterprises in psychiatry and religion, such as the National Academy of Religion and Mental Health (TIME, April 9). Jesuits take part in seminars at the famed Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kans. Next fall Union Theological Seminary will install Psychoanalyst Earl Loomis Jr., 35, as its first professor of psychiatry.
Arguments Over. If Sigmund Freud were still alive, he might be surprised and even put out to discover how calmly the revelations that shocked Vienna in the 19005 are now accepted and fitted to the varied beliefs, yearnings and works of religion and modern society. "They may abuse my doctrines by day," he once declared, "but I am sure they dream of them by night." In a sense he was right. Freud as philosopher and counselor to man will be the subject of argument and doubts for many days and nights to come. But over Freud as the bold explorer of the dark side of the mind, there is no argument left. Said one psychiatrist last week, Swiss Catholic Charles Baudoin: "All modern psychology must be based on the exploration of the unconscious which must allow us to understand the human soul and to influence it in a fashion never before attempted or imagined. Modern man cannot conceive of himself without Freud."
*A brilliant Welshman who is now 76, Jones studied under Freud during visits to Vienna, has written in the first two volumes of a projected three-volume work, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, one of the most penetrating biographies of modern time (TIME, Oct. 19, 1953; Sept. 19, 1955). A firm admirer, Analyst Jones also is responsible for placing Freud's bust in the great hall of the University of Vienna with the inscription Freud confessed having imagined in the 18703.
*Said of Oedipus by the chorus at the close of Oedipus Tyrannus. Finding his native Thebes terrorized by a Sphinx that slew all who could not answer her riddles, Oedipus answered her correctly, and the Sphinx destroyed herself. He then married Jocasta, by whom he had four children, not knowing she was his own mother, or that he had killed his own father. *The Greek god of love, better known these days as Cupid.