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… Fr White's thesis is that a crisis in religion and psychotherapy has arisen out of the fact that for him there is no distinction between ‘soul’ and ‘psyche’, although within the soul or psyche he also maintains ‘a distinction of the supernatural life of grace from its purely natural activities’ (p. 168). All analysts and some priests will agree with him…
… Fr White's verbal dexterity succeeds only at the cost of ignoring the full content of experiences like those of the integration of the shadow, the activation of the animus and anima, etc. The anima is allowed in terms of one aspect only, i.e. the good daughter or wife submissive to God. The shadow is not integrated but made conscious in order to become seemingly innocuous. Again the threefold nature of the deity has been reaffirmed while the nature of Christ has been accepted as fourfold. This involves Fr White in stating with approval that the Trinity is transcendent, infinite, and adorable, and that its created image is to be found only in the higher mental processes of the psyche (p. 109), i.e. not in man's corporality, solidity, and animality (p. 108). The sting has been withdrawn from some of the non-rational and demonic aspects of the unconscious, so that analytical psychology becomes an adjunct of Christian apologetics — a point that cannot be too clearly stated.…
Another result of Fr White's abolition of the distinction between soul and psyche is that attention gets turned towards the fact of neurosis in saints. This is dealt with at some length in a chapter on ‘Health and holiness’. He seems to get near to the idea that illness is an accompaniment of dynamic processes in the individual and society, but in the end the neurotic disorders of the saints are ascribed to the results of a historical and universal breaking-up of an original ‘good’ order, i.e. the Fall, so that sanctitas, sanitas, perfectio, integritas (i.e. wholeness) become both the work of renewing grace and eschatological, i.e. not achieved in