Revista De Psiquiatria Y Psicologia Medica. I, 1953: The Moral Limits on the Investigation and Treatment by Scientific Methods. (An allocution made by the Pope to the First International Congress of Histopathology of the Nervous System, in Rome, 1952.) Pp. 52-66.

This paper is the French translation of the original Italian presentation. In the introduction the Pope states: 'The physician, as a human being, and inasmuch as he is serious and profound, will not be satisfied with examining from a purely medical viewpoint what he plans to undertake and to carry through; he also wishes to see clearly the moral side of the possibilities as well as his own moral obligations. In order to justify morally new procedures as well as tentative methods of medical research and treatment, three principles are to be applied: 1, the interest of medical science; 2, the individual interest of the patient to be treated; 3, the interest of the community, the "bonum commune".'

The Pope points to the lack of validity of a scientific method applied in the manner of the Nazi physicians in concentration camps and to the fact that those so-called scientific methods were not justified by the community's interest in Nazi ideology. In relation to the individual interest of the patients to be treated, the Pope says, 'In order to free himself of repressions, inhibitions, or psychological complexes man has not the right to arouse in himself all or any of the sexual desires that disquiet him or have done so in the past, bringing in their wake impurity to his unconscious being. He must not indulge in bringing his fantasies and his desires into full consciousness, with the shock and all the repercussions that such a procedure involves. There exists for man as well as for the Christian a law of personal integrity and purity, of self-esteem that forbids him to dive without restraint into the world of imagination and of sexual drives. The "medical and therapeutic interest of the patient" is therefore limited by morally defined boundaries. It has not been proved, it is even not correct to say that the all-out sexual method of a certain school of psychoanalysis forms an essential and indispensable part of psychotherapy that is competent and worthy of its name