Like many Catholics who have had therapy, I was riveted to learn that Pope Francis had sought the help of a psychoanalyst for six months when he was 42. He made the disclosure in a book based on 12 in-depth interviews with the sociologist Dominique Wolton, just published in France.
“For six months, I went to her home once a week to clarify a few things,” he told Wolton of his sessions. “She was a doctor and psychoanalyst. She was always there.”
The relationship was clearly close, as a good relationship with a therapist should be. “Then one day, before she died, she called me,” the Pope recalled. “Not to receive the sacraments – because she was Jewish – but for spiritual dialogue. She was a good person.”
The Pope’s disclosure comes as relief and comfort to me. I also began to have therapy in my early 40s, and hitherto a bit of me has worried about the decision. Was I in some way being disloyal to my faith by seeking help beyond the confines of the spiritual guidance provided by my priest and my local church? Should I not be turning to God, rather than a smiley lady in the chair opposite?
Pope Francis’s admission has helped me to grasp that the choice is not binary. It is possible, and indeed helpful, to combine faith with therapy. God’s forgiveness and compassion can be experienced through and with the help of human interaction. At a stroke, Francis has challenged the perception that Catholics who have therapy are weak. Therapy has come home.
This revelation is the culmination of a gradual shift in attitudes within the Catholic Church towards psychotherapy since the 1970s, not to mention within society as a whole. Counselling is now a part of some priestly formation programmes, especially before admission to a diocese to see if candidates are suitable for this demanding role. By 2008, the Vatican issued guidelines on the use of psychology in the training of priests, which it said could be useful.
The relationship between therapy and religion is two-way. Therapists recognise the importance of faith. Though Sigmund Freud was an atheist, Carl Jung was much concerned with spirituality and the search for meaning.
For the Pope, therapy helped him when he needed to “clarify a few things”. In his case, those things were traumatic indeed. At the time he underwent analysis, he had just ended his term as leader of the Jesuits in Argentina under the country’s military dictatorship. Tensions were running high during the so-called “Dirty War” and the future pope had been accused, in 1976, of effectively delivering two priests to the military authorities (a charge he firmly denied).
Given the pressures that he was under, and the succour he was delivering to others, enlisting therapeutic help for his own wellbeing seems less eye-popping news. It is a commonplace in the therapeutic world that therapists themselves need assistance. In weekly “supervision” they discuss their clients and experience as a way of processing their involvement with others.
In addition, there are more psychologists in Argentina than in any other country. Figures for 2011 show that there were 196 psychologists for every 100,000 people, compared with about 27 per 100,000 in the US. Given the environment Pope Francis was in, it would have been more dramatic if he had not had psychoanalysis.
For me, therapy was helpful in my recovery from two major breakdowns, one in 1997 and the second in 2004. During the second episode, I was bedridden for nearly a year with debilitating depression.
Partly because of my own resistance to seeing a therapist, I only sought help after my second major depressive episode. I knew that I needed to keep working at recovery. A history of depression makes you more likely to relapse. Subsequent episodes tend to be worse and more difficult to recover from. I needed to try to pre-empt depression and minimise the risk of its recurrence.
We gain our sense of self from our interaction with others. Therapy is about a relationship between two people in a room and, importantly for me, in the moment. This has become a key to my recovery: learning to stop regretting the past and worrying about the future and to enjoy the present moment.
My therapist, Sarah, worked by helping me to identify my feelings, root them out, classify them and investigate how they had solidified into beliefs. By acknowledging my feelings, especially those of anger, I came to accept them, and became less judgmental of myself and others in the process.
That journey has taken another significant step thanks to the Pope’s implicit acknowledgement that self-awareness and introspection can be complementary to spirituality. The bit of me that worried about having therapy has been laid to rest. I won’t be only person saying a prayer of thanks for Francis’s revelation.
Rachel Kelly is a writer and mental health campaigner. Her latest book is The Happy Kitchen: Good Mood Food (Short Books, £10.49)
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