in the United States. Nearly 200 centers are listed where “prosperity bank drills” and respiratory rituals are advocated. Leaders solemnly write, “the psychical body radiates an energy that can at times be seen as a light or aura surrounding the physical, especially about the heads of those who think much about Spirit.”81
The following are typical testimonial letters, and these are but three among many hundreds:
“I wrote to you somewhat over a week ago asking for your prayers. My trouble was appendicitis, and it seemed that an operation was unavoidable. However, I had faith in the indwelling, healing Christ and decided to get in touch with you. Well, as you might expect, the healing that has taken place borders on the so-called miraculous. I spent an hour each day alone with God, and I claimed my rightful inheritance as a child of God. Naturally the adverse condition had to disappear with the advent of the powerful flow of Christ-life consciously directed towards this illness.”
*****
“You will be interested to know that just about the time when my prosperity-bank period was up I went to work in a new position, which not only pays a substantially higher salary but… [etc.]. I should probably not have had sufficient faith and courage to trust Him had it not been for the Truth literature.…”
*****
“Thank you for your beautiful and effective ministry. I have had five big demonstrations of prosperity since I had this particular prosperity bank. Last week brought final settlement of a debt owed me for about seven years,”217
*****
Not a few citizens of our country read, apparently with conviction, material such as that published by the director of the Institute of Mental Physics, who is announced as the reincarnation of a Tibetan Lama. This leader reports, furthermore, that he has witnessed an eastern sage grow an orange tree from his palm and, on another occasion, die and rise in a new body, leaving the old one behind. Many other equally improbable feats of thaumaturgy are described in eyewitness accounts.{†}
The casual observer has been known to dismiss what many call superstition as the fruit of ignorance. Nevertheless, beliefs and practices of this sort are far from rare among the most learned in all generations. A recent ambassador to the United States, generally recognized as a distinguished scholar, died (according to the press) under the care of a Practitioner of Christian Science.
Even a doctor of medicine has written a book in which he attests to the cure of acute inflammatory diseases and other disorders by similar methods. But let him speak directly:
“At another time I examined a girl upon whom I had operated for recurrent mastoiditis. At the time of my examination she was showing definite signs of another attack.… Absent treatments stopped her trouble in two days. To one who had never seen anything of the kind before, the rapidity with which the inflammation disappeared would have seemed almost a piece of magic.”241
*****
“A third case is that of a woman who carried a bad heart for years. About a year ago she experienced an acute attack accompanied by pain, nausea, and bloating caused by gas. Her daughter telephoned to a practitioner of spiritual healing and explained the trouble to her. The reply was that an immediate treatment would be given. In ten minutes the trouble was gone, and there has been no serious recurrence since.”241
The more one considers such convictions and the sort of people who hold them, the more impressive becomes the old saying attributed280 to Artemus Ward and indicating that our troubles arise not so much from ignorance as from knowing so much that is not so. Hundreds of other examples like those above are available to demonstrate that many persons of high ability and superior education sincerely cherish beliefs which seem to have little more real support from fact or reason than the ordinary textbook delusion. Such beliefs are held as persistently by respected persons and influential groups, despite evidence to the contrary, as by psychotic patients who are segregated in hospitals.
Let it be understood that X am not advancing an opinion that those who are persuaded by prophets that the world will end next Thursday or that those who appeal to faith healers to protect a child from the effects of meningitis, should be pronounced as clinically psychotic and forcibly committed to hospitals. Despite the similarity between the way such beliefs are adopted and the way a schizoid or paranoid patient arrives at his delusions, and despite the similar lack of evidence for considering either true, people such as those now under discussion are usually capable of leading useful lives in harmony with the community and sometimes of benefit to society. Nothing, in my opinion, is more basic than the necessity for men to allow each other freedom to believe or not to believe; however sacred, or however false, different creeds may be held by different groups.
Convictions that the world is flat, that one must not begin a job on Friday, or that Mr. Arthur Bell of Mankind United168 is omnipotent, are apparently held by some in reverent identity with the deepest religious attitudes of which they are capable. In this basic sense, each man’s religion, as contrasted with the dogma or illusion in which he may frame it, his basic attitude and emotional response to whatever meaning and purpose he has been able to find in his living, deserves respect and consideration. The Methodist, the Mormon, and the Catholic, as well as the man who cannot accept any literal creed as a final statement of these issues, can honor and value, in a fundamentally religious sense, the valid reverence and the ultimate subjective aims of a good Mohammedan. This is possible without the ability to share his pleasant convictions about the likelihood of houris in paradise
CHAPTER 2. TRADITIONS THAT OBSCURE OUR SUBJECT
In raising general questions about personality disorder we have briefly considered (1) persons suffering from illnesses that progress to major mental disability and (2) the numerous citizens of our nation, many of them able and well educated, who hold beliefs generally regarded as unsupported by evidence and considered by many as irrational or even fantastic. Aside from these groups and aside from all types of patients recognized as psychotic, there remains for our consideration a large body of people who are incapable of leading normal lives and whose behavior causes great distress in every community.
This group, plainly marked off from the psychotic by current psychiatric standards, does not find a categorical haven among the psychoneurotic, who are distinguished by many medical characteristics from the people to be discussed in this volume. They are also distinguished practically by their ability to adjust without major difficulties in the social group.
Who, then, are these relatively unclassified people? And what is the nature of their disorder? The pages which follow will be devoted to an attempt to answer these questions. The answers are not easy to formulate. The very name by which such patients are informally referred to in mental hospitals or elsewhere among psychiatrists is in itself confusing. Every physician is familiar with the term psychopath, by which these people are most commonly designated.48 Despite the plain etymological inference of a sick mind or of mental sickness, this term is ordinarily used to indicate those who are considered free from psychosis and even from psychoneurosis. The definitions of psychopath found in medical dictionaries are not consistent nor do they regularly accord with the ordinary psychiatric use of this word.{‡}
These definitions notwithstanding, the word psychopath is, in practice, popularly used for reference to a large group of seriously disabled people, listed with other dissimilar groups under the heading psychopathic personality. This cumbersome and altogether vague diagnostic category officially includes a wide variety of maladjusted people who cannot by the criteria of psychiatry be classed with the psychotic, the psychoneurotic, or the mentally defective, It is by no means uncommon in
