THE CULT OF SECULAR PSYCHOLOGY

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.