Truth is just truth; you can't have opinions about truth.
-- Peter Schickele

Pentecostals have differing opinions on psychiatry and psychology. Many reject the disciplines altogether. Psychotherapy, the efforts to relieve guilt and adjust other mental or emotional disturbances through applied methodology, is indeed suspect. Even among its practitioners it is incurring criticism for its inability to provide real, permanent, complete cures.

But well-taken criticism of psychiatry and psychology from Christians is due more to the assumptions which frequently underlie their practice than to the disciplines themselves. At the root of much psychiatry and psychology is the view of man as a mere animal with no real spiritual dimension (except that which can be taken as a psychological phenomenon). Added to this is the assumption that the mind is merely a mechanism which can be adjusted or manipulated. If there is guilt for past or present sins, excise it. If there are feelings of depression, loneliness, an inner longing for a deeper meaning to life, adjust them. If there is psychological disturbance, fix it.

But the essential practice of studying the human mind -- of psychiatry, the medically-related study; of psychology, the study of human behavior -- is perfectly valid. If "all truth is God's truth," then the truths made available through study of the mind can and should be appropriated and applied to the human condition and to Christian experience.

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Outline of this Article

1. The Subconscious Mind, Seat of the Real Self
2. The Inner and Outer Self and Mental Wellness
3. The Seat of the Holy Spirit

Sources

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