Social media grenade-launcher Matt Walsh recently posted the following on his FaceBook page:
"Many people claim to know for a fact that the practice of psychotherapy has been deeply helpful to humanity. To those people, I ask: If therapy is generally so helpful, and more people than ever are doing it, then why are people less able to deal with hardship and cope with suffering than ever before? Is it because our lives are really so much more difficult?"
It's a fair question.
It's certainly hard to make the case that our lives are so much more difficult than, say, those of our Great Depression era grandparents or great-grandparents.
Add to this the fact that despite the ubiquity of mental health services in American society, we are in the midst of an ongoing and worsening mental health crisis, particularly among the young. It's almost as if the expansion of mental health services has in some way contributed to the proliferation of mental illness.
Thousands of articles like the following have been written over the past half-decade examining the problem and ultimately failing to come up with good answers:
Over 50% Of Liberal, White Women Under 30 Have A Mental Health Issue. Are We Worried Yet?
Depression rates among US adults reach new high: Gallup
Rates of Depression and Anxiety Are Rising in Young People
Many will no doubt blame the mental health crisis on a host of pop-politico-cultural bugbears: sexism, student debt, racism, transphobia, the COVID shutdowns, MAGA-terror, etc. But could the core reason for this epidemic of mental illness be that fewer people than ever before in the West are practicing Catholics who make regular and devout use of the sacraments of the Church?
Now before you dismiss this possibility out of hand, I'd like to call your attention to a talk by one of the primordial psychoanalysts of the early 20th century, Carl Gustav Jung.
Jung was the offspring of a Swiss Lutheran pastor. Several of his uncles were also Protestant pastors, and it was expected that Carl himself would find a career in the ministry. Instead, Jung rejected Christianity and entered the nascent world of psychotherapy as it was developing under Sigmund Freud. During his life, Jung had numerous spiritual experiences, nearly all of which a believing Catholic might consider encounters with the demonic.
All this is to say that Carl Jung was no great friend of Catholicism.
And yet, in a lecture he gave in London in April of 1939, on the eve of the outbreak of the Second World War, Jung was asked to offer insights on why the believing Catholic was not subject to neurosis, or at least not to the same extent as, say, Protestants or Jews. Jung's answer is fascinating:
"You have heard that I said Roman Catholics are less threatened by neurosis than members of other religious confessions. Of course, there are Catholic neurotics just as well as others, but it is a fact that in my forty years of experience I have had no more than six practicing Catholics among my patients. Naturally, I do not count all those who have been Catholics, or who say that they are Catholics but who do not practice; but of practicing Catholics I have had not more than about six. That is also the experience of my colleagues. In Zurich we are surrounded by Catholic cantons; not quite two-thirds of Switzerland is Protestant and the rest is Catholic. And then we have on the frontier Southern Germany, which is Catholic. So we should have a fair number of Catholic patients, but we have not; we have very few....
"...Now, I have spoken of my own experience in this field, but recently statistical researches have been made in America about the very same question, but from another angle. It is a sort of appreciation of the amount of complexes, or complex manifestations, you find in people. You find the least or the smallest number of complex manifestations in practicing Catholics, far more in Protestants, and the most in Jews. This is absolutely independent of my own researches; a colleague of mine in the United States made these researches and that bears out what I have told you. [See more on this below.]
"So there must be something in the Catholic Church which accounts for this peculiar fact. Of course, we think in the first place of confession....The fact is that there are relatively few neurotic Catholics, and yet they are living under the same conditions as we do. They are presumably suffering from the same social conditions and so on, and so one would expect a similar amount of neurosis. There must be something in the cult, in the actual religious practice, which explains that peculiar fact that there are fewer complexes or that these complexes manifest themselves much less in Catholics than in other people. That something besides confession, is really the cult itself. It is the Mass, for instance. The heart of the Mass contains a living mystery, and that is the thing that works. When I say "a living mystery," I mean nothing mysterious; I mean mystery in that sense which the word has always had—a mysterium tremendum. And the Mass is by no means the only mystery in the Catholic Church."
Of course, by "the Mass", Jung was referring the Traditional Latin Mass as it was known everywhere by Catholics prior to the late 1960s. After a tangent during which Jung elaborates on ancient symbolism as found in Catholic ritual, he returns to confession with this very curious passage:
"When a practicing Catholic comes to me, I say, 'Did you confess this to the father-confessor?'
Naturally he says, 'No, he does not understand.'
'What in hell, then,' I say, 'did you confess?'
'Oh, lousy little things of no importance'—but the main sins he never talked of.
As I have said, I have had quite a number of these Catholics—six. I was quite proud to have had so many, and I said to them, "Now, you see, what you tell me here, this is really serious. You go now to your father-confessor and you confess, whether he understands or does not understand. That is of no concern. It must be told before God, and if you don't do it, you are out of the Church, and then analysis beings, and then things will get hot, so you are much better off in the lap of the Church."
So you see, I brought these people back into the Church, with the result that the Pope himself gave me a private blessing for having taught certain important Catholics the right way of confessing." [Source: C. G. Jung, The Collected Works, Volume 18: The Symbolic Life, beginning on page 267]
God only knows if what Jung says above regarding the Pope giving him a private blessing is actually true. His account has a pretty thick overlay of hubris, so it is perhaps best to take it with a grain of salt.
But the fact remains that this former Lutheran spiritualist psychoanalyst who occasionally had communication with potentially demonic beings was astounded by the psychological resilience of practicing Catholics.
I looked up the American study Jung cited and found out that it was part of a 1938 work entitled Explorations in Personality: A Clinical and Experimental Study of Fifty Men of College Age by Henry A. Murray. Murray was another mid-20th century psychological researcher who was no great friend of Catholics. In his conclusion, Murray writes:
The Catholic subjects were conspicuously more solid and secure....There was relatively little anxiety-linked material bubbling up in the minds of the Catholics. Their repressions were firmer and what occurred in their depths could only be inferred indirectly by interpreting their projections. It was as if their faith in an ultimate authority relieved them of the necessity of independently resolving fundamental issues. Their unconscious fears, one might say, were quieted by the hovering presence of the maternal Church. And if they were unable sometimes to live up to the precepts of their religion, they knew that forgiveness was always at hand. A secret, remorseful confession and once more they would be beneficently accepted members of the flock. It might be supposed that the irrational unconscious tendencies of these Catholics were so satisfactorily interpreted by a wise, human and altogether forgiving Church that they never knew what it was to feel themselves alone and forsaken in a maelstrom of incommunicable feelings and ideas. In the rationalized fantasy system of an effective Church there is a place for everything, and the faithful communicants do not have to face—and thus become conscious of and wrestle with—the naked impulses of their own souls. The problem of good and evil is settled and only the problem of moral will remains. Our Catholic subjects were relatively happy, free from neurotic symptoms, blissfully self-deceived, superficial in their psychological discernments, and always competent to clothe raw facts in the rational vestments of their faith."
Were they really "self-deceived"? Or had they adopted a faith that allowed them to see the world as it truly is, understand it, and react to the challenges presented by life in healthy and resilient ways? Given that Murray's later career included abusive experiments on college students, one of whom was apparently so damaged that he went on to achieve infamy as the Unabomber, I'm not particularly concerned about his judgments on self-deception.
Sad to relate, those very aspects of Catholicism which formed such mentally strong men and women in the past—the Mass, the rituals, the sacraments and confession in particular—were all watered down and de-emphasized in the aftermath of the 1960s. The result has been that today's Catholics, practicing or otherwise, seem just as susceptible to mental illness as the rest of society.
Nevertheless, we can hear echoes of this resilience even today. Anecdotally, some of the most emotionally and psychologically solid people I have ever known may be found among that relatively small remnant of Catholics who steadfastly practice the faith with reverence and devotion. Never have I encountered a group of people who have endured so much personal suffering with such abiding grace. I am continually amazed at how many of these good people are struck with truly gut-wrenching family tragedies. And yet, they are able to endure, heal, and carry on, trusting that Christ will always be with them and that their departed loved ones are even now praying for them before the heavenly throne of God Almighty.
It is not controversial to observe that many of the current-day princes of the Catholic Church have wandered far from the traditional teachings and practices of the Church. Perhaps if these men would pause their awkward shamble after adolescent sexualized mysticism, they might realize that the ancient practice of Catholicism which they largely discarded in the 1960s was among the greatest treasures that God has ever gifted to mankind.
At the very least, we can posit that the traditional practice of Catholicism is a way to comprehend the triumphs and tragedies of human existence that does not ultimately drive men mad.
The same can not be said for the neurotic mess that modern Western secular culture has become.
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