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Psychiatry
Eliminates the Soul
The word psychology derives from psyche (soul) and ology (study of); the subject
originated as a religious and philosophical study. However, as Franz G. Alexander,
M.D., and Sheldon T. Selesnick, M.D., noted in The History of Psychiatry,
�As long as psychiatric problems were those of the �soul,�� only the clergy
and philosophers �could be professionally concerned with such problems.� To
re-define man�s travails in �medical� or �biological� terms was half the trick
in wrenching spiritual healing away from religion and firmly into the domain
of psychiatry.
This was achieved when German psychologist Wilhelm Wundt unveiled �experimental�
psychology to his students at Leipzig University in 1879. Wundt declared that
the soul was a �waste of energy� and that man was simply another animal. The
theory merely required that man be conditioned to accept different ideas about
the value of human life. Religion, he said, was a �kind of primitive metaphysics�;
religious ideas and feelings belonged �before the tribunal of psy- chology�
and the �ideal world of the religious imagination [was] by no means necessarily
an ethical ideal. Indeed, it almost always contains elements which, judged by
the standards of the developed moral consciousness, would appear at least morally
indifferent, if not actually immoral.�
Through this new �transcendent� mental science, Wundt declared that it was only
psychologists and psychiatrists who possessed the proper �developed moral consciousness�
to lead the �tribunal.�
By reducing spirituality to psychological factors, Wundt�s students boasted
that this new psychology had become a �science without a soul.� Historian J.
R. Kantor tells us: �Materialism is essentially a non-scientific movement, a
phenomenon of social transformation and change. In the religious domain a materialist
is simply an atheist.�
Psychiatry, first coined in 1808 by Johann Christian Reil, means �doctoring
of the soul��from psyche (soul, spirit) and iatros (doctor). Ironically,
psychiatrists have never addressed matters of the spirit or soul, instead concentrating
exclusively on the brain.
Both psychiatry and psychology became the domain of �soulless� science and
the study of man was �officially� restricted to the material world� the body
and the brain. The idea of the spirit being �a sensible being, separable from
the body,� a belief held by a large percentage of civilized man, was �scientifically�
relegated to primitive races.
It is no surprise then, to find religion and philosophy�the forces that had
lifted mankind from the pit of barbarism�on a collision course with this revolutionary
new view. Secularism or materialism took hold, with Wundt�s teachings branching
out across the globe through his students.
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