Book
Jesus, the Village Psychiatrist. by Donald Capps. Louisville, KY: Westminster/ John Knox, 2008.
Reviewer
Janet M. Berg, MD, Psychiatrist, Evergreen Clinic, Kirkland, WA.
Early in this book Donald Capps describes the behavior of a squirrel darting across a busy street, then suddenly freezing midway and racing back, only to dart again. He calls this a “living parable” (xv) and says we are intrigued because we see ourselves in the squirrel’s dilemma.
I couldn’t agree more. In fact, I felt like that squirrel as I was reading this volume, at times running quickly to reach what I hoped was food for thought, and then retreating swiftly as the author’s beliefs and mine clashed.
I started the book intrigued by the title, only to freeze in the introduction at comments such as these: people with mental illnesses are “doing it to themselves” (xii), mental illnesses are “a form of coping and … therefore typical … today” (xii), and “the methods which Jesus employed are congruent …with methods …demonstrably effective …today” (xxv).
These statements portend what becomes clear in the rest of the book. Capps is a believer in Freudian psychoanalysis, a school of therapy formulated by Sigmund Freud in the late 1800s and popular in the US in the mid-1900s. It treats patients with psychotherapy in the belief that insight into conflicts which precede the illness will result in healing.
That paradigm of mental illness is rejected or at least highly suspect in the field of modern psychiatry. With the increasing use of brain scans and molecular research, psychiatry is moving in a biological direction in which mental illnesses are seen as dysfunctional states of the normal brain. Psychoanalysis has not proven effective in most mental illnesses.
Despite my momentary freeze I dashed on. The book is short, only 131 pages, and is divided into two parts.
Part 1 is an academic explanation of psychoanalytic terms such as conversion and hysteria, and Part II is an analysis of seven cases of Jesus’ healing. The cases (two paralyzed men, two blind men, the demon-possessed boy, Jairus’s daughter, and the hemorrhaging woman) are used to illustrate Capps’ thesis that Jesus did not use magic to heal medical illnesses but employed therapeutic techniques to heal psychosomatic illnesses.
Full understanding of Part I requires some prior knowledge of and belief in psychoanalytic principles, and thus may not be of interest to the general audience that Capps targets in his introduction. Part 2 may be easier for general readers but still requires some background.
It was surprising to me that Capps uses a blend of psychoanalytic descriptions and more modern diagnostic criteria from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the “DSM,” with DSM IV being the fourth version, published in 1994). I was in psychiatric residency in the late 1970s when the first draft of the DSM was published and thus my training focused heavily on it. The DSM was known to be an attempt to describe conditions objectively, replacing the psychoanalytic model of mental illness that theorizes about etiology or cause.
Capps’ review of the minute details of diagnostic criteria of conversion disorder, factitious disorder, and somatization disorder from DSM IV was difficult to read through. His attempt to apply them to persons who lived 2000 years ago and whom the Bible describes only in barest detail was simply perplexing. Reading the cases, I found myself skimming through the academic material to get to the insights about Jesus.
This is where I found the book provocative; for short periods I actually enjoyed myself, not feeling like a squirrel at all. Capps’ suggestion that Jesus did not use supernatural powers to cure people but actually listened to them challenged me to stop discounting Jesus’ healing stories as easy for him because he was divine.
Capps’s insights regarding the healing of Jairus’s daughter are excellent. For example, he points out that Jairus’s daughter was twelve, thus on the cusp of marriageability, representing to her father an opportunity to increase his wealth by marrying her off well.
The author’s thoughts on Jesus’ understanding of the social context of illnesses and the implications of wellness are tantalizing but too brief. Each time I would begin thinking “Now he's getting somewhere,” the chapter would end.
I finished the book hungering for more. Completing the analogy of the squirrel, I had braved all the academic traffic, only to find that the delectable pile of insightful spiritual nuts I was hoping for was small.