Was Freud Wrong About Religion?

David

Welcome to the show -- and today listeners are hearing highlights from Dr. Scott Richards’ forthcoming memoir, Dissent from Freud: My Lifelong Search for the Soul of Psychology "[pauses]".

David

Picture a classroom in the old Smith Family Living Center on the Brigham Young University campus. It is just before nine in the morning in September 1979. There is that faint smell of chalk dust and polished floors, rows of wooden desks, sunlight catching little particles in the air. A young Scott Richards is in his junior year, early in his psychology training, still trying to find his place. He has no idea that in a few minutes he is going to witness a pivotal moment in the history of psychology that will change the trajectory of his education and career.

David

Dr. Brown introduces the guest speaker: Dr. Allen Bergin. And this is not some minor figure passing through campus. Bergin has a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Stanford. He completed a research postdoctoral fellowship with Carl Rogers at the University of Wisconsin. He had been a full professor at Teachers College, Columbia University before coming to BYU. He was internationally respected for psychotherapy outcome research. So Scott, understandably, sits up straighter and gets his notebook ready.

David

Then Bergin opens with a line that hits the room like a thunderclap: “Religion is currently on the fringe of clinical psychology when it should be at the center!” That is not a cautious little footnote. That is a direct challenge to the reigning assumptions of an entire profession. Bergin then holds up a manuscript--titled "Psychotherapy and Religious Values"-- and says "it has just been accepted for publication in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, a leading APA journal."

David

Bergin then explained that the manuscript had already faced resistance. One reviewer wanted it rejected outright because religion, in that reviewer’s view, had no place in psychotherapy. Another reviewer disagreed with the ideas but thought it should be published because Bergin himself had written it. A third supported publication. Bergin explained that the editor, who was his friend and a former colleague, decided to publish it despite the mixed reviews. Bergin joked that "sometimes who you know matters more than what you know." Funny line -- but underneath it is a serious fact about the field at that time. To criticize psychology’s anti-religious bias in a major professional setting took real courage.

David

Bergin then goes straight at the intellectual roots of the problem. He points to Freud’s 1927 book The Future of an Illusion, where Freud argued that religious ideas are wishful illusions and that civilization would be better off abandoning belief in God in favor of reason and science. Bergin says Freud was not alone. John Watson, B. F. Skinner, even Carl Rogers -- major architects of modern psychology -- either ignored religion or cast it in negative terms. And once that happened, psychology, for much of the twentieth century, treated religion with disinterest, suspicion, sometimes even outright disdain.

David

Bergin’s deeper point is methodological and moral. He argues that if psychologists refuse even to consider that God may exist, that human beings may be creations of God, and that spiritual processes may shape behavior and mental health in benevolent ways, then the field has already decided the answer before doing the investigation. That is not neutrality. That is a worldview pretending not to be a worldview.

David

For young Scott Richards, this lands at exactly the right place. During his teenage years, his father’s mental illness had already pushed him to want to understand suffering, treatment, and recovery. At the same time, his own religious faith told him that spiritual life matters profoundly. Until this lecture, those two commitments felt tense, private, almost unspeakable in academic psychology. Bergin gives that tension language. He makes it visible. He makes it intellectually serious.

David

Then comes one of the most memorable lines in the whole scene. A student asks why ideas about God belong in psychology at all. Bergin answers by going back to the word itself: psyche, meaning breath, spirit, or soul, and logia, meaning the study of something. Psychology, at its roots, is the study of the soul. And Bergin says psychology lost part of its SOUL when Freud and other early leaders pushed God and spiritual realities outside the boundaries of legitimate theory and research. In their place came materialist assumptions -- determinism, reductionism, hedonism -- and a field preoccupied with pathology, conflict, and dysfunction.

David

He warns about something else too: if therapists ignore religion, they can end up subtly imposing an alien value system on religious clients. Carl Rogers himself had acknowledged that psychotherapy could be subversive in ways that conflict with traditional faith. Bergin’s point is sharp and ethical: misunderstanding religious people, or quietly dismissing their deepest convictions, is not respectful clinical care. For Scott Richards, sitting there in that classroom, psychology suddenly seems bigger, deeper, and more exciting.

David

At the end of the lecture, Bergin asks for questions. Scott raises his hand and asks the question that really reveals the beginning of a vocation: what should the next steps be for those who want to integrate psychology and religion? Bergin’s answer is concrete. More research on religion and mental health. A serious effort to find out whether bringing religious values and spiritual resources into psychotherapy can actually improve treatment outcomes. And then he says something that, to Scott, feels like an invitation: there is a great deal of work to be done, and bright, courageous young people are needed to do it.

David

After class, Scott does something simple but decisive. He hurries to the front, introduces himself, and asks whether he can get a copy of Bergin’s manuscript. Bergin hands over the typewritten pages and says, essentially, let me know what you think. I love that detail. A distinguished psychologist takes an undergraduate seriously enough to place the manuscript directly into his hands. Sometimes a calling begins with a theory. Sometimes it begins with paper.

David

That evening, in a modest apartment near campus, Scott sits at a small desk and reads the manuscript slowly. He underlines passages. He writes notes in the margins. He reads it a second time. And what starts to crystallize is that the conflict he has felt is not merely personal confusion. It is an intellectual and professional conflict built into the history of psychology itself. That realization matters. When a private tension becomes a public question, it can finally be studied, argued, tested, and maybe healed.

David

And that dissent became Scott Richards’ lifelong calling. The question was no longer just whether faith could coexist with psychology. The question was whether faith and spirituality might be powerful resources for healing, recovery, moral meaning, and human flourishing -- and whether rigorous science could help show that. That is a very different agenda from Freud’s suspicion that religion is basically illusion. It is also different from a shallow spirituality that avoids evidence. Bergin’s challenge, and later Scott’s own work, is to build a bridge between science, psychotherapy, and the spiritual lives people actually live.

David

That broader movement is now visible in places like the Bridges Institute for Spiritually Integrated Psychotherapies, led by Scott Richards, whose mission is to increase awareness of and access to competent spiritually integrated mental health treatment around the world. The classroom spark did not stay in one room. It became a larger effort to bring spirituality out of the margins and into serious clinical and scientific conversation.

David

And that is really the mission of this podcast series too. Some episodes will share memoir highlights like this one -- vivid turning points, moments of conviction, scenes where a life direction becomes clear. Other episodes will focus on research findings, case examples, interviews with leaders in the psychology of religion field, clinical guidelines, and self-help recommendations for the public. Because this conversation has to work on both levels: the personal and the scientific, the human story and the evidence.

David

Scott Richards sits at that desk, manuscript open, evening light fading behind the mountains, and realizes that the soul of psychology may not be dead after all -- maybe it has just been waiting for people willing to look for it. That is a haunting thought, honestly. If psychology has something to learn from faith, then the real question is not whether Freud was wrong about religion. It is how much healing has been missed while the field kept looking away. Thanks for listening.