4 0 S p i r i t ua l i t y S t u d i e s 8 - 2 Fa l l 2 0 2 2 an ideal society based on behaviorist principles. Rollo May (1909–1994) explains (1967, 218–19): If you want a fairly exact picture in contemporary psychology of a modern Garden of Eden, you have only to read Professor Skinner’s Walden Two. In Walden Two there is freedom from anxiety, guilt, and conflict; you are good and wise without trying or choosing to be, and like Adam and Eve under the trees, personal relationships are ‘under the most favorable conditions,’ as Professor Skinner phrases it. Under the benevolent dictator of Walden Two, the people are said to be happy. But it is a post-human, animal happiness, with the capacity to question and constructive dissatisfactions lost. Though I disagree with Walden Two, I am not worried about it, for all that I know about human beings as a therapist or as a student of human history leads me to be confident that if there were a next chapter in the book, it would be a resounding revolt against the dictator and the system; and whether the dictator is malevolent or beneficent is irrelevant. Since its inception, modern Western psychology has gradually cut itself off from its metaphysical roots. This is evidenced, in part, by a shift away from the use of the word soul or psyche to the term mind being increasingly adopted. This process of severing the transcendent dimension from the human soul is due, in large part, to the modern world’s secularizing and reductionist outlook. In its desiccated condition, modern psychology cannot provide psychic stability – let alone wholeness or healing – as it lacks a sense of the Sacred. Modern science appears to be “neutral” or “value-free”, but this is not the case. Its totalitarian position asserts that what truly exists is only that which can be empirically verified through the five senses. This is none other than scientism, the ideological belief that only the scientific method can provide exclusive criteria for establishing truth or reality. It is a fundamentally pernicious worldview that has blighted the relationship between human beings and the cosmos not to mention the far-reaching psychological harm that has ensued from this rupture. Psychology today repudiates the metaphysical foundations that, alone, can give it access to a tripartite understanding of the human being as Spirit, soul, and body (along with its corresponding modes of knowing and healing). Accordingly, the modern form of this discipline has, by and large, been relegated to a study of merely mental phenomena with no reference to the transpersonal reality that abodes in all beings. If psychology wishes to restore the spiritual dimension to a proper “science of the soul”, it first needs to contend with the undeniable truth that “having first bargained away its soul and then gone out of its mind, seems now, as it faces an untimely end, to have lost all consciousness” (Burt 1962, 229) and, likewise, “[t]he soul or consciousness, which played the leading part in the past, now is of very little importance; in any case both are deprived of their main functions and glory to such an extent that only the names remain… [note: Modern psychology] sang their funeral dirge while materialism – the smiling heir – arranges a suitable funeral for them” (quoted in Kornilov 1930, 268). This desacralized outlook in contemporary psychology is further underscored by John B. Watson (1878–1958), founder of behaviorism or behavioristic psychology: One example of such a religious concept is that every individual has a soul which is separate and distinct from the body. This soul is really a part of a supreme being. This ancient view led to the philosophical platform called ‘dualism.’ This dogma has been present in human psychology from earliest antiquity. No one has ever touched a soul, or seen one in a test tube, or has in any way come into relationship with it as he has with the other objects of his daily experience… (1970, 3). When the first psychological laboratory was established, that psychology at last had become a science without a soul (1997, 5). Without situating ourselves in this arc of human history, it is difficult to obtain sufficient context to understand the relationship between the soul and the ecology, and to see how we have gotten to where we are. In order to comprehend the calamitous events that have catalyzed today’s ecological degradation, we need to recall the emergence of humanism and the gradual secular trajectory of the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution, which ultimately gave rise to the European Enlightenment. These developments have unleashed the destructive forces that continue into the present. The traditional world, which was rooted in metaphysics and the Sacred, was usurped, which could only happen if something had been substituted in its place. Here, we can observe that the Sacred was displaced by a profane understanding of nature, which has had irrevocable consequences for humanity. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) and International Classification of Diseases (ICD) provide numerous refined categories; however, they do not recognize the interconnection of the psyche with the ecology, or the quality of our relationship to the environment. The inability of DSM and ICD to account for the spiritual dimension, its potential to balance the human psyche, and its connection to the natural world is a serious shortcoming for the discipline.
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