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Manhattan Psychotherapist Albert Ellis agreed with Mowrer that Freudian insight alone is not enough to change deviant behavior. But he denied any place for a concept of sin in psychotherapy. Though he conceded that the individual must take full responsibility for his actions. Dr. Ellis insisted: "No human being should ever be blamed for anything he does." Therapists, he argued, must rid their patients of "every possible vestige of their blaming themselves, others, or fate and the universe." In fact, Mowrer and Ellis were not so far apart. Some of their differences were semantic. Though Dr. Ellis had ransacked dictionaries, he offered no definition of "blame" to fit his usage. He obviously meant self-blame as a continuing, nagging and. in fact, neurotic process, leading to a damaging sense of worthlessness.
Then, argued Ellis: "The more sinful and guilty a person tends to feel, the less chance there is that he will be a happy, healthy or law-abiding citizen. His sense of sin will literally drive him away from not doing wrong and toward doing it. He will become a compulsive wrongdoer." Worse, the individual who lets self-blame run away with him cannot help blaming others, thus becoming angry and hostile. Therefore: "Blaming, in all its insidious ramifications, is the essence of virtually all emotional disturbance."
It was a religious psychologist. Professor Charles A. Curran of Chicago's Loyola University, who wove the conflicting concepts of sin into a medically meaningful unity. A sense of sin, he suggested, is like the sensation of pain—a warning signal for avoidance or recoil. Some children, born with no reaction to pain (TIME, Jan. 14, 1957), are grievously handicapped in life. While nobody wants to inflict pain on them, they would be healthier, happier and safer if they could feel pain. To Dr. Curran, while too keen a sense of sin may be as bad as too much pain, a proper amount of it will protect both the individual and the society he lives in.