Dr. Phil: "Psychology and Catholicism go hand in hand"

Dr. Phil: "I stand firmly with my Catholic friends who mourned the death of the Pope, and I joined them in prayer for a new Pope who will reunite them. Doing this is consistent with the teachings of one of the giants in my profession, the founder of analytic psychology, Carl Jung—who, by the way, was not Catholic either.

I share some of his observations about Catholicism, not just for my Catholic friends, but also to help us non-Catholics evaluate the life of the Pope by applying principles central to both Catholicism and psychology. You see, Carl Jung studied Catholicism in his quest to understand psychology.

He said: “Even as a Protestant, it is quite clear to me that, in its healing effects, no creed is as closely akin to psychoanalysis as Catholicism.” He noted that the symbols of the Catholic liturgy offer the unconscious a vast wealth of possibilities for expression, acting as an incomparable diet for the psyche. He recognized that psychology and Catholicism share similar methods, logic, and rules."