While many still value talking to a psychologist, it doesn’t
seem that many believe that they will be changed by it, at least not in the way
that surgery might make a radical difference. However, the worldview of secular
humanistic psychology (SHP) has taken our minds captive.
In Understanding the
Times, philosopher David A. Nobel identified SHP’s three basic beliefs:
·
Man is good by nature and therefore perfectible;
society and its social institutions are responsible for man’s evil acts; and
mental health can be restored to everyone who gets in touch with his inner
nature. (171)
A broad consensus of psychologists and laymen agrees with
Nobel’s description, especially that society is the problem and not the
individual. However, Rollo May, a SHP psychologist, raises an appropriate
challenge:
·
But you say that you “believe that it is cultural
influences which are the major factor in our evil behaviors.” This makes
culture the enemy. But who makes up culture but people like you and me?”
From where then comes our hope, which we all need to get out
of bed in the morning? Having rejected God, the SHP psychologists are left with
one other source - hope must come from the self. How then is this hope to be
released? SHP resorts to several approaches – building self-esteem (the belief
that we have what it takes), self-love, self-forgiveness, and self-confidence (a
sense of mastery). Consequently, it’s all about the self.
Does SHP work?
Perhaps temporarily! There is power in faith, even faith in oneself. However,
when faith finds little support in the facts, it begins to whither. In The Psychological Society, Martin L.
Gross had written:
·
“Two-thirds of the patients examined at close
during treatment and about three-quarters seen in follow-up have improved.
Approximately the same percentages of improvement are found for the comparable
groups of untreated children,” Levitt explains in the Journal of Consulting Psychology.” (29)
The “placebo effect” is perhaps even more damning to
psychology’s presumption that it can cure:
·
Psychologists Allen E. Bergin and Sol Garfield,
co-editors of the Handbook of Psychotherapy and Behavior Change state, placebos
“too often yield improvement figures very close to therapy group figures.
Between 50 and 76 percent of patients taking placebos showed improvement, about
the same percentage showing positive results for psychotherapy.” (Gross, 26)
Even psychologists have expressed grave doubts about their
profession. Dr. O. Hobart Mowrer, a former president of the American Psychological Association,
concludes,
·
“I have become progressively disenchanted with
results of psychotherapy and with the underlying theory itself…I am convinced
that, in general, psychotherapy doesn’t do patients very much good. Before he
died, Freud himself admitted that the therapeutic effectiveness of
psychotherapy is poor, and that it was mainly a research tool.” (Gross, 32)
SHP faces other
severe problems. For example, what kind of society does SHP produce by
shifting the blame from individual crimes to society? Nobel cited Communism as
another belief system that blames society:
·
The major problem with capitalist society,
according to the Marxist, is the divisive nature of classes. The oppression of
one or more classes by a ruling class (the bourgeois) is deviant, and creates
more deviant behavior. This behavior will always become manifest in
capitalistic society, and can only be eradicating by restructuring society.
(180)
However, apart from slaughtering 100 million of their own in
order to achieve their ideal society, Communism has done little to alleviate
human suffering. Instead, human thriving requires us to take responsibility for
our own behaviors. Consequently, we cannot simply learn how to forgive
ourselves when we hurt others. If we strike our wife, we cannot blame society
or merely tell her, “I have forgiven myself.” Instead, we must humble ourselves
to apologize and make amends, even if it requires us to take a domestic abuse
course.
Are we to trust and
believe in ourselves? Not if it involves self-deception, which it
inevitably does. Why? To see ourselves accurately is to be humbled by what we
see. However, instead of inflating ourselves, we need to humble ourselves as Jesus
had taught:
·
For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled,
and he who humbles himself will be exalted.” (Luke 14:11)
From a Biblical perspective, we were never intended to place
our trust in ourselves but in a relationship with a God who loves and wants to
forgive us:
·
Thus says the LORD: “Cursed is the man who
trusts in man and makes flesh his strength, whose heart turns away from the
LORD. He is like a shrub in the desert, and shall not see any good come. He
shall dwell in the parched places of the wilderness, in an uninhabited salt
land. “Blessed is the man who trusts in the LORD, whose trust is the LORD. He
is like a tree planted by water, that sends out its roots by the stream, and
does not fear when heat comes, for its leaves remain green, and is not anxious
in the year of drought, for it does not cease to bear fruit.” (Jeremiah 17:5-8)
SHP relies upon self-stimulation rather than upon the love relationship,
which we were always intended to enjoy.
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