Chapter 15

PSYCHOLOGY: ERADICATING THE SPIRIT.

    Having looked at psychiatry, it is in our interests to look at psychiatry's cousin, psychology. Where did it come from? It is not native or natural to Japan.

    The subject of psychology originated in the West. It is called psychology in English and initially meant the study of the soul - psych (meaning soul) and ology (meaning study of). As the derivation of the western word (psychology) suggests, psychology originated as a religious study. However, it took on a scientific posture when the German psychologist and educator, Wilhelm Wundt, unveiled "modern" or "experimental" psychology at the Leipzig University in 1879. Here he trained the first generation of students in experimental psychology. Many of these students became the founders of psychology in-schools in Germany, the United States and Britain. To Wundt, religion was a "kind of primitive metaphysics.212

    Psychiatry, also came from the west. The English word psychiatry, was first coined in 1808 by Johann Christian Reil, and it means "doctoring the soul" - iatros (doctor). Ironically, psychiatrists have never pretended to administer to matters of the spirit or soul. They have concentrated on the brain. The first faculties of psychiatry were established in Leipzig and Berlin in Germany in the early 1800s.

    Psychiatry and psychology were ideal partners as they were useful for totalitarian governments of Germany to adopt the firm policy that man was by nature materialist. For the totalitarians the subjects would enable them to take great control over society with these souless sciences. Wundt's students even boasted, after the first psychological laboratory was established in 1879, that this new psychology had become a "science without a soul." Man's character was soon claimed to be a product of genetics and his upbringing. Man went from being responsible for his behavior to being assigned causes from outside his control.213

    One of Wundt's students was Ivan Pavlov. He was arguably the most infamous "man-is-ananimal" advocate. Pavlov, and another Wundt student, Vladimir Bekhterev, developed conditioned-response theories using experimental dogs. This laid the basic psychiatric concept which states, that men are like dogs and they can be conditioned like a stimulus-response mechanism. These experiments were the foundations of the

    later brainwashing experiments in the USSR, China, and then later in the USA. Today the same theories are at the base of the work of Japanese faith-breakers called deprogrammers, who are also psychiatric or psychologically trained and inspired.

    In the USA there was another student of Wundt's named William James. A Jame's biographer, Clarence J. Karier, tells us that with James "we pass from a culture with God at its center to a culture with man at its center. With James, Western society underwent a transformation - Salvation .vas now a matter of survival, sin became a sickness, and such religious rituals as confession, designed to alleviate guilt and atone for sin, were replaced by individual and group psychotherapeutic interventions, designed to alleviate the guilt of the anxiety neurosis.

    One of the greatest antagonists of religion was psychologist Sigmund Freud. He declared religion as the "enemy" and spiritual belief as superstition and the "universal obsessional neurosis. " 214 He also envisioned the death of the Christian church at the hands of psychiatry.

    After the European war of 1914 to 1918, the Christian churches opened themselves to any who would want to help. In stepped the psychologists. Consider the following statements: John B. Watson said, "No one knows just how the idea of a soul or the supernatural started .... It probably had its origin in the general laziness of mankind." He also said, "Give me the baby, and I'll make it climb and use its hands in constructing buildings of stone or wood .... I'll make it a thief, a gunman or- a dope fiend. The possibilities of shaping in any direction are almost endless...." 215

Psychiatry Usurping Western Churches

    After years of exposure to Wundtian psychology, Elwood Worcestor became a leader in the "Religio-Psychiatric Movement" (later redefined as the "Religion and health Movement"). In 1904, Worcester accepted the position of Rector of the Emmanuel Church in Boston, Massachusetts. Within two years, a failure at social ministry, Worcester began the Emmanual movement, a 'modest experiment in the cure of souls based on the unity of body and soul." His declaration that the church had lost its control over the lives of Americans was embraced by the media, with one journalist commenting: "... the church, taken as a whole no longer leads or even deeply moves the American people." Counselors - led by prominent psychiatrists and psychologists "undertook to interfere to change their patients' attitudes and way of life. "216 In reality, it represented the first public assault on traditional religious values and principles.

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