Question: Are the techniques used on people in psychotherapy reliable?

Question: Are the techniques used on people in psychotherapy reliable? [From our archives, July 1986]

Response: I can’t begin to answer that thoroughly here. I’d suggest you read Martin and Deidre Bobgan’s book, The Psychological Way/The Spiritual Way and other books by Christians refuting the scientific claims of psychotherapy.

You just can’t escape the fact that psychology has a very, very powerful influence in modern society. We have turned our society over to these people. Here’s a quote from a book, The Psychological Society, by Martin Gross. He says, “the major agent of change in modern society is psychology. This cult sits at the very center of contemporary society as an international colossus whose professional minions number in the hundreds of thousands. Its ranks include psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, clinical psychologists, psychotherapists, social workers, family therapists, educational psychologists, sensitivity groups and encounter leaders, assorted lay therapists, Christian psychologists” and on and on and on it goes. Here’s what he says: “Its experimental animals are an obliging, even grateful, human race. They [psychotherapists] don’t know what they are doing.”

Just get a subscription to Psychology Today. Read it from 10 years ago or 5 years ago and see how the theories have changed. You’ve got 250 psychologies and 10,000 therapies. It’s a smorgasbord of personal preferences, and the research proves that none of them are scientific nor do they necessarily offer any help. Yet the church has become the largest referral agency to psychologists and psychiatrists. Christians have forfeited what used to be called the cure of souls to what is now called the cure of sick minds. It’s not biblical nor is it scientific!

Psychologists also have the highest occupational hazard rate of any profession—divorce, suicide, alcoholism, etc. The Bible is the manufacturer’s handbook that claims to have “everything that pertains to life and godliness.” Why turn to a bankrupt system? I’ve already shared with you that 7,000 of the world’s leading psychotherapists recently gathered in Phoenix to evaluate where psychotherapy has come in 100 years. R. D. Laing summed it up well. He said he couldn’t think of any fundamental insight into relationships between human beings that has resulted from a century of psychotherapy.