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 in churches] can't be wrong. Church membership is helping people to live more worthwhile and satisfying lives."* Mental health, he said, is inseparably intertwined with questions of moral values, as well as with feelings of guilt, anxiety and insecurity. Said Executive Director George C. Anderson, associate chaplain at Manhattan's St. Luke's Hospital: "The 325,000 clergymen in the U.S., teaching Sunday schools and preaching in pulpits, can foster healthy emotional attitudes if they have some knowledge of emotional dynamics. They can bring about a more realistic attitude toward guilt, with less emphasis on sin while still recognizing its importance."

The academy's backers include former presidents of the American Psychiatric Association and ministers of the Protestant (among them, Theologian Paul Tillich), Roman Catholic and Jewish faiths.

* He also might have quoted Freud, who can be accused of facing both ways: "Religious piety stifles neurosis."

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