In the September 19th isue of the America Magazine (in their series "From our pages" ) there is a writing of Jacques Maritain dating back to 1952 entitled
"The Apostolate of the Pen" in which he discusses the situation of a "Catholic writer", the possibility or impossibility of being of an "apostle through ones artistic or scientific work. I find his thoughts well adaptable for Christotherapy - or more in general for the possibility of a "Catholic" or "Christian psychotherapy".
Maritain points out that the goal of apostolic work is very well distinct from the goal of an artist or philosopher:
"The Christian apostolate is intended to convey to men the good tidings of the Gospels and to lead souls to faith in revealed truth. It has its proper ways and means. For a writer to make a novel or a metaphysical treatise an instrument adapted to this purpose, or to any other purpose extraneous to the proper exigencies of his work, would involve some risk for the very quality of the work…"
Similarly, I would say that the goal of an apostolate is clearly different from the goal of a psychotherapist/psychiatrist, the first aims at spreading the Gospel while the latter working for restoring psychological/mental health with the specific means of spychology/psychiatry.
Of course, there is the case of the Catholic pychotherapist who is in a similar situation to the Catholic writer with the call for fidelity not just of his/her faith but to the quality of his/her scientific approach. As Maritain confesses:
"…It is not easy to be a Catholic, and it is not easy to be a writer. To be a Catholic writer is doubly difficult. There is, on the one hand, the danger of yielding to the spell of art or human knowledge so as to fail in the requirements of the supreme truth. And there is, on the other, the danger of using divine truth to which we and our fellow believers adhere in common to compensate for possible failures in our fidelity to the requirements of art or human knowledge. I do not believe there is any other means to overcome these risks than a good deal of humility and some kind of appreciation of, or yearning for, the ways of the spiritual life."
As far as the possibility of "Catholic psychotherapy" goes, I think it exists only in the sense as an effort to uncover psychotherapeutic elements in the revelation (in Scriptures and in the tradition of the Church). In this case the Catholic psychotherapist – Christotherapist – measures the revealed truth and the scientific methods against each other and strives to find new insights which could foster new approaches and methods of healing but without subordinating the healing purpose to influence in the field of faith.
