The Psychological Theory and Mortification Therapy of Drs. Anna A. Terruwe and Conrad W. Baars: Some Disputations and the Proposal of a Difficulty

• Main Author: Dillon, James P
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 01-01-2020
• Subjects: Epistemology; Psychology; Theology
• ISBN: 9798645424893

Anna A. Terruwe and Conrad W. Baars developed an original therapy for obsessive-compulsive patients, drawing on the insights of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas to help understand the true nature of psychological disorder and psychological health. Their theory of “repression” redefined the Freudian concept in terms of Thomistic psychology, rejecting false ideas in the former. They defined repression as a pathological act wherein one passion acts immediately against another passion on account of a misjudgment of the cogitative power, and obsessive-compulsive repression (OCR) is the resulting habitual disorder that obtains. Terruwe and Baars claimed that OCR patients are clinically shown to be completely unfree regarding the passion which they have repressed. Therefore, patients with sexual repression were said to be “completely unfree” in sexual matters. To release this repression, Terruwe and Baars designed “Mortification Therapy,” which tells patients that they must mortify their repressing passion and allow themselves to experience passively their repressed sexual desires, permitting whatever solitary venereal acts followed from such passivity. Terruwe and Baars held that patients were not culpable for such acts and must tolerate them during therapy in order to come to health. This thesis does three things: it overviews the relevant teachings of Terruwe and Baars; it examines the relevant public disputations of that teaching; and it argues that, in light of modern clinical findings regarding the ability of OCR-S patients to form imperfect habits contrary to their compulsions, therefore there is a difficulty as to Terruwe and Baars’s premise that obsessive-compulsive patients are clinically found incapable of forming such habits, and finally, that this means there is a difficulty with the premise that OCR-S patients are completely unfree in sexual matters, and thus also a difficulty for the moral liceity of MT that demands address.