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PASTORAL PSYCHOLOGY
Characterological Deformities and Personality Defects
Functional nervous disorders and constitutional
eccentricities of character necessarily affect religious attitudes and
behaviour.
Sometimes religion is used by nervous people as a means of
satisfying emotional needs that have no religious basis. They
make religion a hobby because the life of the Church gives
them opportunities to assert themselves. The feeling that they
are associated with something important and mysterious
stimulates their egotism; and there is no doubt that the neurotic
mind is always stimulated and intrigued by the obscure or
unattainable. Neurotic people with no deep spiritual life or
experience often study the Bible and religious literature with
diligence in order to gain a reputation for profundity of religious
knowledge.
On the other hand, the religious life of a neurotic person may
be deep and sincere. Then it is an integrating power that
prevents the eccentricities and inward disharmonies of a
defective personality from having a destructive effect, and
enables a poorly endowed man or woman to rise to the full
height of his or her possibilities while accepting gracefully the
limitations that cannot be overcome.
There are, of course, neurotic people who remain immune
from both spiritual and psychological treatment. They are so
well entrenched behind their symptoms that it is impossible to
reach them. Every psychotherapist and every doctor knows
patients who go from physician to physician, taking one course
of treatment after another. They never get any better. They
always find reason for criticising or blaming those who try to
help them. The spiritual counsellor meets similar cases. They
cannot be assisted unless they can be shaken out of the false
religiosity that protects them from themselves. Their lives have
been built, like a house, on unsound foundations. The only way
to correct the trouble is to pull down the house and build again
from the ground; and this the inhabitant of the house will not
allow.
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