Evangelical Reformation

Freud may influence your life more than you think. Freud generated several major concepts that still influence in our society, and I frequently hear people, including evangelicals, refer to them, often without knowing their source.

One of the crasser manifestations involves referring to someone as “anal.” This alludes to Freud’s theory of psychosexual stages, which hypothesizes that the failure to pass through one of the stages successfully distorts the individual’s personality. The anal stage includes issues such as potty training, and the anal personality is defined as up tight, overly meticulous, and suspicious. This theory of Freud’s is highly speculative at best.

A more serious aspect of Freud’s legacy is found in his view that the human personality consists of the id (desires), ego (conscious rational capacity), and superego (the conscience and ego ideal—what one views to be his ideal personality). The id makes demands such as for promiscuous sexual gratification. The superego condemns those demands. The ego is left to referee between the two.

Pathology results when the battle between the id and superego gets out of hand, placing the ego under excessive pressure. Freud believed that the Victorian sexual restrictions of our society overdeveloped our superegos, creating undue pressure for the ego. If that were the case, people should be really healthy psychologically today. Apparently he was wrong. Nonetheless, his ideas helped spawn the sexual revolution. Now we have liberated superegos, a trashed society, and people in therapy in unprecedented numbers. Where is Queen Victoria now that we need her?

Yet another idea from Freud, one which most people (including evangelicals) believe, is that pathologies result from negative past experiences, which leave emotions bottled up within our unconscious.

Since the source of the problem is buried in our unconscious, the individual cannot resolve the problem himself. Rather, a therapist must help him regress to those experiences and express the bottled up emotions. Doing so will release him from his pathological feelings and behaviors.

Certainly negative past experiences may be the root cause of emotion and behavior problems; however, Freud’s solution is problematic. This process of ventilation makes matters worse, not better. It may give some immediate release, like giving an alcoholic a drink will enable him to feel better temporarily, but in the long run it only exacerbates the problem.

It is easy to understand why. Reliving past negative experiences only refreshes our memory of them, increasing their power. Nonetheless, likening of negative emotions to a polluted swamp that must be drained by validating the negative experience is widely held in our society. As a result, more people feel better temporarily but ultimately prolong the agony and the pathology.

None of this reflects a biblical perspective of the human personality, nor is any of it developed out of good research or supported by it. It was embraced and is kept alive by faith in Freud.

Has your computer ever automatically decided to upgrade itself from Windows 98 to Windows XP? When you turned it on have you found a message that it had written on the monitor that said, “I really felt outdated running with this Windows 98. I kept waiting for you to upgrade me, but since you were slow in getting around to it, I decided to do it myself.” Of course, this is a dumb question (except for Mac users, who believe that Macs can do anything). Computers can’t do anything for themselves but can only respond to what is done to them from the outside.

In this series of posts, we have been discussing the question of how we can change from what we are to what we want and ought to be. We noted that different views of the human being lead to related views of change. This computer model is the view of the human being advanced by behaviorism. This psychological theory, most famously championed by B.F. Skinner, contends that the individual has no will, no capacity to choose to change himself, but rather that society programs him, and he has no capacity to override that programming. He is merely a biological machine responding to stimuli.

This model is compatible with a naturalistic approach to origins, which only believes in the existence of matter and energy, thus eliminating the possibility of an immaterial soul. This view reduces human beings to biological machinery.

B.F. Skinner was perceptive enough and honest enough to understand and convey the full implications of this position. In his popular book, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, Skinner observes that the commonly held perspective of the human being believes that “a person is responsible for his behavior, not only in the sense that he may be justly blamed or punished when he behaves badly, but also in the sense that he is to be given credit and admired for his achievements.” He contrasts this perspective with that of behaviorism by observing: “A scientific analysis shifts the credit as well as the blame to the environment….” In other words, Skinner believed that science had proven his position that human beings are merely biological machines, and acknowledges that this view leads to the conclusion that the individual should neither be held responsible for his bad behavior nor given credit for his good behavior. He does not possess the freedom to make genuine choices and consequently lacks the dignity to act with love, responsibility, courage, fidelity, and nobility.

Therefore, the behaviorist position is that we have no capacity to change, but must depend on our environment to reprogram us if we are to become better people. Of course, society may program us for worse instead of for better. As we consider the nature of our current society, the odds favor a change for the worse.

This lack of a soul and that corresponding incapacity of the individual to be responsible for wrongdoing and credited for good deeds strips the person of value. Or to put it differently, the person of behaviorism is a non-person.

The good news is that the Bible does not view us his way. God holds us responsible for our actions and calls us to change. In Genesis 4:6-7 we read: “Then the LORD said to Cain, ‘Why are you angry? Why is your face downcast? If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must master it.’” Likewise, in multitudes of other passages we find God calling us to obey Him and holding us responsible to do so.

Though the behaviorist view has had significant impact on our society in the past, and still has some lingering influence, currently other views of the human being and the nature of change are more influential. In our next post, I plan to discuss one of those views.

How much would you like to weigh? Pick your ideal number. Most of us are not there. Moving to a deeper level, what personality characteristics would you like to change? Anger, impatience, laziness, disorganization, or fearfulness might be some common options. The fact is that most, if not all of us have struggled to be different in some area for many years without success.

How do we change from what we are to what we want to be? Our hope is that the next diet program or the next self-help book, maybe even the next sermon, will provide the key. There are lots of people out there offering approaches to change. The reason is obvious. Most of us have such a deep desire to make changes that we are willing to pay to make that happen. This is especially true when we have had a long history of struggle without success.

The two big players in the change industry in our society, especially in the more profound areas of life, are Christianity and psychology. I have been reading a book on how a non-runner can run a marathon. (I find that it is easier to read the book than to actually run one.) The book has three contributors that write a part of each chapter. One is a psychologist. In our society, we believe that changing from a non-runner to a runner requires the input of a psychologist.

For centuries, Christians have debated over what the Bible teaches about change. Psychologists have a similar debate, with every psychological theory offering a different approach to change. Each of these Christian and psychological approaches flows out of a specific view of humanity. For example, from a Christian perspective, a Calvinistic view of humanity differs from an Arminian one, which leads to differing views of change. Likewise, with psychology a behaviorist perspective of the human being differs from a Rogerian view, leading to vastly different change mechanisms.

The reason so many approaches exist is that change is hard, and none seems to provide the results we are seeking. Part of the reason for this may be that we are not merely interested in methods for change, but methods that will enable us to change easily. We want psychologists or society or significant others or the Holy Spirit to do the work. “Let go and let God” or “Let go and let the anti-depressant,” seem to be a comfortable approaches.

Coming to the issue from a Christian perspective, I believe that there is a right approach to change, i.e. one that is built on a valid understanding of the nature of the human being. One of the challenges in seeking to find that approach is that we may find one that “works” in the sense that it enables us to make the changes we are seeking, but because it is not the right approach, because it is not rooted in a valid view of humanity, it ends up creating problems in other areas of life. For example, diet pills may enable us to lose weight but may hurt our health. Likewise, self-esteem may enable us to be more assertive, but it may also ruin relationships.

In the posts to come, I plan to discuss and evaluate different approaches to change. Since this is such a crucial life issue, I trust you will visit and interact.