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Fr. A. Bonnar. New York: P. J. Kenedy & Sons, 1938. 172 pp.
COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY. Thomas Verner Moore. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1939. 604 pp.
These two books are written by two monks, one of whom is a Benedictine, a priest, and a physician. It is obvious that in matters of religious principles and purity of dogma Fr. A. Bonnar, O.F.M., D.D., and Dom. Thomas Verner Moore, Ph.D., M.D., will find no points of disagreement. Yet from the standpoint of the rational approach to human psychology, these two authors are great distances apart.
Fr. Bonnar is concerned primarily with the preservation of the Catholic tradition. One cannot quarrel either with his intent or with his arguments. He is opposed to the use of contraceptives, to euthanasia, and to sterilization, all of which contradict the Catholic dogma. The difficulties begin when Fr. Bonnar makes a brief excursion—about forty-five pages—into psychology, particularly into freudian psychology. The freudian topography is accepted: the id, ego, superego, conscious, preconscious, unconscious. The usual pseudophilosophical argumentation rejects the empirical findings because of the Catholic attitude towards the problems of determinism and free will.
It is more than regrettable when authoritative Catholics addressing Catholics as well as those outside the Church fail to realize that that which the philosoper, lay or religious, chooses to find in Freud as dealing with philosophy has really nothing to do with empirical, clinical psychoanalysis. The fact that Freud or Jones chose to assume a definite and mostly negative attitude towards religion does not make the clinical system of psychoanalysis false, any more than does Galileo's deflection from the dogma of the Church disprove his optics. Psychoanalysis does not thereby become immoral any more than medicine becomes immoral when it cures a criminal of pneumonia or of a gun shot wound without admonishing him to abandon his criminal career. That Fre