Discussion

Dr. Vollmerhausen's extraordinarily stimulating and provocative paper deals with three major topics—religion, psychotherapy, neuroses—and is unified by the theme that an undue quest for order and predictability is injurious to effective functioning. In evaluating this essay, two major questions seem relevant: 1) the validity of the assertions about each of the topics; and 2) the appropriateness of the imputed interrelationships. Since the chasm between the two cultures of sociology and psychiatry is wide, and since neither discipline is notorious for the precision of its language, it might be well to review what I take to be Vollmerhausen's most salient points.

Religion, especially ritualistic religion, may be construed as a series of beliefs and actions that are designed to insure certain rewards either in this world or the hereafter. Speaking very generally, these rewards take the form of justice and predictability. The religious man hopes that his adherence to particular doctrinal prescriptions about the supernatural will render his universe both orderly and benign.

Psychiatrists who are dogmatic disciples of a particular theoretical system, Horney doctrine for example, exhibit some of the same characteristics of the true believer. The uncritical acceptance of an intellectual formula offers the promise of justice to the therapist by persuading him that the patient will either show discernible improvement or, failing this, that he will benefit during his psychiatric afterlife, that is at some future time when he is no longer visible to the doctor. The analyst is therefore insulated from the possibility of failure. Strong adherence to a theoretical system fulfills the desire for order by banishing untidy counter-interpretations and by freeing the therapist from any compulsion to engage in an unfamiliar confrontation with novelty. One