Question: I believe psychology filtered through the Bible is a powerful tool. What do you say?

Question:I am a registered psychotherapist and I reject Freudian and Jungian beliefs. However, I did find that when you remove these demonic influences and stick with the "science" behind psychology and filter it through the Bible that it's a powerful tool. Proverbs in particular along with New Testament scriptures encourage us to guard our heart and mind, renew our mind with God's Word, and find peace of mind. The Bible is actually the BASIS of TRUE Psychotherapy if you study the subject biblically. What do you say?

Response: It's instructive that just in the last week we have been contacted by Christian psychologists who insist that "psychotherapy" by name has been discarded by Christians who limit themselves to being called Biblical Counselors. Further, secular psychologists have also gone down this path. We appreciate your "rejection" of Freudian and Jungian beliefs. It is clear that your heart is for those you seek to help. With that in mind, the pertinent question to ask, however, is how thorough that process has been? We say that because some of these counselors are still using the teachings of those you correctly label as "demonic influences."

Other psychologists have "come out" with the same concern for how they have been trained, and what they have learned in practices that span several decades.

More recently, the Transgender movement has shown that "science" has very little to do with an utterly emotional, anti-science practice. So, we have to make sure we've gutted the structure of psychology/psychotherapy.

There is, however, the often seen reference to the “Science” of psychology. There's a fascinating article entitled The Puzzle of Paul Meehl: An intellectual history of research criticism in psychology (i.e., checking them out from the perspective of real science [https://bit.ly/4ihy1qX]).

Professor Andrew Gelman writes, "There’s nothing wrong with Meehl. He’s great. The Puzzle of Paul Meehl is that everything we’re saying now, all this stuff about the problems with Psychological Science and PPNAS and Ted Talks and all that, Paul Meehl was saying 50 years ago. And it was no secret. So how is it that all this was happening, in plain sight, and now here we are?"

Meehl concluded his 1967 article by saying, "Some of the more horrible examples of this process would require the combined analytic and reconstructive efforts of Carnap, Hempel, and Popper to unscramble the logical relationships of theories and hypotheses to evidence. Meanwhile our eager-beaver researcher, undismayed by logic-of-science considerations and relying blissfully on the ‘exactitude’ of modem statistical hypothesis-testing, has produced a long publication list and been promoted to a full professorship. In terms of his contribution to the enduring body of psychological knowledge, he has done hardly anything."

We will pray that as you devise your way, the Lord will direct your steps further.