Truth & Freedom | John Paul II's Catholic Understanding of Psychology

Just sharing some quick gold from 'Love & Responsibility'.

Hi Stack friends,

I write you this from my reading week in the loft at home in Wales.

I haven’t written something long form in a while (and feel bad about it) but I just read something great and wanted to share it with you here.

I brought Karol Wojtyla’s ‘Love & Responsibility’ home with me to read across my reading week. If you don’t recognise that name, you might know him better as Pope John Paul II - a real giant of the 21st Century.

I’ve been intimidated by this book for years, in fact, I write the start dates of when I start reading books on their front pages and this book has four start dates written on it! That’s how many times I’ve put it down. But, this time I’ve succeeded and now have something to offer you.

It is a challenging read - part theology, part philosophy, part psychology, part ethics - but it is worth powering through.

My counselling training has continually exposed me to how much our early years and family life shape us, which is ultimately all about the realities of marriage, family and experiences of/lack of unconditional love. I wanted a greater understanding and foundation in what my faith tradition had to say about these topics and ‘Love & Responsibility’ is the definitive text on this, written as a response to the sexual revolution.

However, just today, John Paul II surprised me with four straight pages of a Catholic approach to Psychology and I was so affirmed by it that I thought I had to share it here.

So forgive these long quotes, but there’s too much good stuff to cut.

(All emphasis is my own. I think I’ve interpreted him correctly here but I could be off and welcome any notes!)

The science of the soul

‘Psychology, which is, as its name indicates, the science of the soul, endeavours to lay bare the structure and the foundations of man's inner life. Its investigations serve to confirm that the most significant characteristics of that inner life are the sense of truth and the sense of freedom.’ p114-115

Bam. What cracking definitions and connections.

I remember coming by the meaning of psyche - a Greek word - which a quick Google will give you as ‘the human soul, mind, or spirit’ and loving that this leaves, ‘Psychology’ open to these different interpretations of the inner life. Mind, soul - psyche is open to either or both. This is helpful for me because Catholics definitely believe both/and in this case.

And even the idea that Psychology exists to lay bare ‘man's inner life’ makes sense of my passion for it. I grew up loving retreats and ministry and so I grew up hearing about an interior life, a spiritual life, how to notice what was going on with me and how to pray. For me, this all felt like a way to grow and then to live a more fruitful and loving life in the here and now.

Truth & freedom

‘Truth is directly connected with the sphere of cognition. Human cognition does not consist merely in reflecting or producing ‘mirror images’ of objects, but is inseparable from awareness of truth and falsehood. This it is that constitutes the innermost and most important nerve in the human cognitive process …

Truth is a condition of freedom, for if a man can preserve his freedom in relation to the objects which thrust themselves on him in the course of his activity as good and desirable, it is only because he is capable of viewing these goods in the light of truth and so adopting an independent attitude to them.

Without this faculty man would inevitably be determined by them: these goods would take possession of him and determine totally the character of his actions and the whole direction of his activity.

His ability to discover the truth gives man the possibility of self-determination, of deciding for himself the character and direction of his own actions, and that is what freedom means.’ p114-115

This is a lot I know, but I love, ‘truth is a condition of freedom’ - how good is that? Of course, it is. The Psych world would maybe say the same but just call it self-awareness. To be confronted by the truth, to face our dragons, allows us to move forward, to become more free.

As always, addiction is so much my frame of reference for this. Sometimes the truth about ourselves is deeply regrettable and painful but the only way towards freedom is to name the thing and then get to work and ask for grace from God and help from neighbour.

But the frame for this is also just the human condition, what Christianity would call sin, sometimes referred to as ‘The Human Propensity to F*** Things Up’.

I came by that phrase in a summer read,

Elizabeth Oldfield

’s ‘Fully Alive’ which borrowed this phrase to talk about sin.

‘Meanwhile, sin, barely recognizable now in the cultural cipher it’s become, is tragedy. What Immanuel Kant called the crooked timber of humanity, the tendency to break things, accidentally and deliberately, that just seems baked in. I like Spufford’s use of [F bomb] because its fricative-plosive helps us hear the brutality. HPtFTU is all the times we choose withdrawal, self-protection or attack. When we center ourselves, not as part of a healthy rhythm of receiving and giving in a web of relationships, but because we’re terrified no one is going to meet our needs but ourselves. I see my sin (which, I should say now, needs meeting with grace, not judgment), as a bundle of my self-destructive tendencies. HPtFTU shows up in lashing out, hiding, numbing behaviors that close down the possibilities of intimacy, with myself, others and the beyond.’

We can’t move towards freedom without the ability to name the truth.

‘The truth will set you free.’

Surely this should be the journey of any therapy.

Integration

Integration is a word which is used a lot in the Psych world and it popped up just lines later. As the book is about relationships, here, John Paul II is talking about it in the context of a couple integrating together.

‘At the same time, however, it aims not only at integration 'within' the person but at integration ‘between' persons.

The Latin word 'integer' means 'whole' - so that 'integration' means 'making whole', the endeavour to achieve wholeness and completeness. The process of integrating love relies on the primary elements of the human spirit - freedom and truth.

Freedom and truth, truth and freedom determine the spiritual imprint which marks the various manifestations of human life and human activity.’ p116

So the truth is always necessary for positive forward motion, like integration with another in love. I have often felt this when the potential of dating someone appears in life. It always causes me to reflect on the state of my life and to think about sweeping my metaphorical courtyard, about whether I am ready to welcome someone in.

And from my married friends, I appreciate that marriage is tremendously exposing, that the truth about how we are is eventually all out there for someone to see. Hopefully, this enables this movement towards integration, built on truth and freedom.

A foot in two worlds

At the beginning of my training, I thought that the Psych world would tell me that my faith was irrational if not delusional. This has not been the case at all. If anything, we have been trained to work with difference, and in this context, it was helpful for others for me to be different.

So, for example, I would state that I pray and not censor this so that a trainee counselling me could tick the box of working with difference. It led me to offer my faith very freely. Having received a lot of casual bigotry for my Catholicism, which I always brace for in some way, I have never felt it so consistently well-received in a secular space as on my training course.

I then worried about what my faith made of the world of Psychology, with all its weirdness and Freudianness - was I messing with something too unspiritual? Was mental health just new phrasing for what faith used to and ought to cover?

Well, in reading John Paul II on this, I felt very affirmed that this work has its place alongside all the other good things, in helping us to move towards the truth about ourselves and our world and therefore, towards freedom.

Stay free friends.

Isaac