A couple of items by WIlliam Coulson on what he and Carl Rogers did to the IHM nuns in California using encounter groups. They have been re-posted on Catholic blogs in response to the current clash between the Vatican and the Leadership Council of Women Religious in the US over the report of the recent visitation there. (I need hardly add that the ACPI website is busily defending the LCWR from the Vatican).
What is most striking about these interviews is that Coulson points out that while what he and Rogers did had hideous consequences, they were acting with the best of intentions. Rogers was a secularist, but he still assumed that the virtues he acquired in his Protestant upbringing were innate to humanity and need not be explicitly taught (rather like certain atheist controversialists argue that people instinctively know what is right and don't need a God to tell them) - and it was precisely because he himself was a good man and had good intentions that he ended up doing so much damage.
www.patheos.com/blogs/kathyschiffer/2012/04/william-coulson-and-the-lcwr-we-overcame-their-traditions-and-their-faith/www.ewtn.com/library/PRIESTS/COULSON.TXTEXTRACTS
COULSON: Okay. At the University of Chicago, where Rogers had done his
most significant work, he had found that young people he was counseling
didn't really need him to give them answers- that they had answers within
them. In retrospect, I understand that these were bright, well-brought-up
young people, or they couldn't have gotten into the University of Chicago.
They were able to figure things out, but they hadn't been able to hear
themselves think, so responsive had they always been to people telling
them what they should do.
So Rogers had the idea that to help these neurotics, we should refer them
to the source of authority within them-in other words, refer them to their
consciences. Notice the assumption that in fact people have consciences!
Well, he was dealing with University of Chicago students in the '40s and
'50s, who had grown up in the Midwest; and, sure enough, they had
consciences.
TLM: -and therefore it would make sense for a therapist to say, "Well,
what do you think? Use your own basic convictions."
COULSON: But Rogers wouldn't be so directive as to say, "Use your own
convictions about ethical law." Rather, he would say, "I guess I get the
feeling that what you are saying is...." This has become a caricature
since, of course; it makes you laugh; but it really was Rogers' locution.
It worked. He could disappear for people, and leave them in the presence
of their consciences.
You see, as a practicing Catholic layman, I thought that was pretty holy:
that God was available to every person who had a decent upbringing, that
he could self-consult, as it were, and hear God speaking to him. I was
thinking of William James's idea that the conscience can provide access to
the Holy Spirit...
Rogers and I did a tape for Bell and Howell summarizing that project; and
I talked about some of the short-term effects and said that when people do
what they deeply want to do, it isn't immoral. Well, we hadn't waited long
enough. The lesbian nuns' book, for example, hadn't come out yet; and we
hadn't gotten the reports of seductions in psychotherapy, which became
virtually routine in California. We had trained people who didn't have
Rogers' innate discipline from his own fundamentalist Protestant
background, people who thought that being themselves meant unleashing
libido.
Maslow did warn us about this. Maslow believed in evil, and we didn't. He
said our problem was our total confusion about evil. (This is quoting from
Maslow's journals, which came out too late to stop us. His journals came
out in '79, and we had done our damage by then.) Maslow said there was
danger in our thinking and acting as if their were no paranoids or
psychopaths or SOBs in the world to mess things up.
We created a miniature utopian society, the encounter group. As long as
Rogers and those who feared Rogers' judgment were present it was okay,
because nobody fooled around in the presence of Carl Rogers. He kept
people in line; he was a moral force. People did in fact consult their
consciences, and it looked like good things were happening...
TLM: Did Rogers write the book, <Becoming a Person>?
COULSON: <On Becoming a Person>. Later there was a book of Catholic sex
education called <Becoming a Person>, which translates Rogers' insights on
the importance of being yourself into the Catholic sexual setting.
TLM: So you're not a person unless you're yourself?
COULSON: That's right. And if we were angels, maybe it would be okay; if
there were not original sin, maybe it would be okay. Maslow did see this:
Abe Maslow, a self- proclaimed happy atheist, but a Jew who understood
evil because Hitler had tried to destroy his people. Maslow warned us not
to do our study on the west coast, because he had tried Rogerian
encounterish things with his students at Brandeis, and they had promptly
become unteachable. Maslow wrote in his journal, "My students have lost
the traditional Jewish respect for learning, for knowledge and for
teachers."
He also saw it as the destruction of professions. He said you cannot
become a chemist, or a doctor, or even a plumber, in an encounter group.
You have to be <taught>. Well, it destroyed profession in another sense:
it destroyed Catholic religious profession, just as it would destroy the
practice of medicine if medicine took seriously the idea that all the
answers are within the students; so, too, did it destroy the vows of the
nuns. There were many priests who didn't even bother to get laicized. They
just left, saying, "My vows don't count for anything, because they came
from somewhere else; they didn't come from within."
END OF EXTRACT