Clinical Theology: A Theological and Psychiatric Basis to Clinical Pastoral Care

Clinical Theology is a course in clinical pastoral training and care which makes full use of the resources and techniques of Psychology. It is the first publication of Dr. Frank Lake's work, on which the Clinical Theology Movement was founded: since 1958, nearly three thousand clergy, ministers and laymen have undertaken the two-year course of training in centres throughout Great Britain. The work is eclectic in its sources, and the author claims originality only in the method of correlating and integrating the data derived from theological , psychiatric and psychoanalytical disciplines. Every reader will concede the justice of this claim, but will notice as well that Dr. Lake has made considerable advances in the diagnosis and recognition of psychological conditions, and especially in the dynamics of them, which he displays by original charts and diagrams. A frontier discipline which relates theological and psychoanalytical data has long been predicted. As long ago as 1857, Archbishop Frederick Temple wrote that our theology has been cast in a scholastic mode...We are in need of, and we are gradually being forced into, a theology based on psychology. The transition, I fear, will not be without much pain. But nothing can prevent it. It is now recognized that Christian pastoral work must include the understanding and cure of spiritual disorders, stresses and deviations. While much can be learnt from psychiatry and psychoanalysis about the characteristics and development of such conditions, there are resources for their cure in certain particular aspects of the work of Christ, especially at its climax, and these resources can be like specific medicines, active against recognisable forms of spiritual and mental pain. Dr. Lake's full analyses of mental and spiritual conditions are illustrated with case-histories, some of which include accounts of the use of the drug LSD-25 which evokes vivid memories of birth and the earliest months; this has brought a striking clarification to the psychoanalysis of many fundamental issues to do with mental health and mental illness. His achievement has been to correlate these with the various patterns of personality within a theological framework.