INTRODUCTION

1. We greet you, dear sons and daughters, who have come from all parts and are gathered together in Rome to listen to learned expositions and discuss questions of psychotherapy and clinical psychology. Your Congress has ended, and, in order to guarantee its results and the success of your research and future activities, you have come to receive the blessing of the Vicar of Christ. Very gladly do We respond to your desire and We avail Ourselves of this occasion to address to you a word of encouragement and to give you some advice.

2. Science affirms that recent observations have brought to light the hidden layers of the psychic structure of man and tries to understand the meaning of these discoveries, to interpret them and render them capable of use. People speak of dynamisms, determinisms, and mechanisms hidden in the depths of the soul, endowed with immanent laws whence are derived certain modes of acting. Undoubtedly these begin to operate within the subconscious or the unconscious, but they also penetrate into the realms of the conscious and determine it. People claim to have devised methods that have been tried and recognized as adequate to scrutinize the mystery of the depths of the soul, to elucidate them and put them back on the right road when they are exercising a harmful influence.

3. These questions, which lend themselves to the examination of scientific psychology, belong to your competence. The same may be said for the use of new psychic methods. But theoretical and practical psychology, the one as much as the other, should bear in mind that they cannot lose sight of the truths established by reason and by faith, nor of the obligatory precepts of ethics.

4. Last year, in the month of September (September 13, 1952-Acta Apostolicae Sedis, vol. 44, 1952, p. 779 ff), acceding to the wishes of members of the "First International Congress of Histopathology of the Nervous System," We indicated the moral limits of medical methods of research and treatment. On the basis of that explanation, We would like today to add something by way of complement. Briefly, We intend to outline the fundamental attitude which is imposed upon the Christian psychologist and psychotherapeutist.

5. This fundamental attitude can be summed up in the following formula: Psychotherapy and clinical psychology must always consider man (1) as a psychic unit and totality, (2) as a structured unit in itself, (3) as a social unit, and (4) as a transcendent unit, that is to say, in man's tending towards God.