Word: sterne
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...current fashion for pitting psychiatry and religion against each other as though they were mutually exclusive took a beating on last week's Catholic Hour from a brilliant Roman Catholic convert who is also a distinguished psychiatrist: Karl Stern, author (The Pillar of Fire) and chief of psychiatry at Ottawa General Hospital. The conflict is not necessary or even real, said Dr. Stern, and the appearance of conflict is fostered by fallacies on both sides...
Among the religious, said Dr. Stern, the most common fallacy is: "If there were only more faith in the world, people would not be nearly so neurotic as they are." But, he went on, "I can show you a number of atheists who are happy people and have never known a sleepless night; on the other hand there are many good, even saintly people, in fact some of our great mystics, who are haunted by terrible states of anxiety and melancholia. That formula does not work ... It is also morally wrong...
...their part, many psychiatrists suffer from an anti-religious bias that is part of the "general positivistic atmosphere of our time," said Dr. Stern-"the belief that science is the only fountain of truth and that revelation is bunk." Some would go so far as to say that scientific progress has made religion obsolete. Others, more moderate, blame religion and its moral codes for causing neurotic anxiety based on feelings of guilt...
...Stern summed up his own position: "The clear distinction between natural and supernatural means of help, which we make in cases of broken legs, must also be made in cases of emotional disturbance." Then, he believes, religion and psychiatry can pull together instead of working at cross purposes...
Beyond Kindergarten. Born at Breslau, Silesia into a prosperous orthodox Jewish family, Edith was the youngest of seven children and the favorite of her stern, devout mother. After an intellectually precocious childhood, she decided to be an atheist at 13, remained one until she was 21. Later she fell under the spell of Phenomenologist Edmund Husserl, who bucked the relativistic trend in German philosophy by reaffirming the existence of objective truth and of a knowable world, i.e., phenomena. Edith's friends teased her, in rhyme, for thinking only of Husserl while other Austrian girls were dreaming of Busserl (Austrian...