Readings: Genesis 2:7-9; 3:1-7 | Psalm 51 | Romans 5:12-19 | Matthew 4:1-11
“The Oldest Therapy Session and Why It Failed”
In 1967, which was, for those of you keeping score, quite possibly one of the greatest years in recorded history, depending entirely on who was born that year and whether they are currently standing at an ambo, it was also, less fortunately, the year a group of psychologists descended upon the Immaculate Heart of Mary sisters in Los Angeles. They came bearing clipboards, encounter groups, and what one participant later described as a great deal of enthusiasm for feelings.
Heading the project was William Coulson, a protégé of Carl Rogers — the father of humanistic psychology and the man who gave the world the concept of “self-actualization,” which is rather like being given a compass that only ever points toward yourself: technically impressive, practically useless, and guaranteed to get you lost. Less a destination and more a lifestyle brand for your interior life.
Rogers believed, with the earnest confidence of a man who had apparently never watched siblings share a back seat on a long car ride, that people’s inner selves are reliable moral guides. All you need to flourish, he argued, is to get in touch with what you authentically feel and then act on it: a principle also invoked by every child who has ever said, “I felt like it was my turn,” moments before launching a toy across the room; By every ten-year-old boy who has ever pulled his sister’s hair and explaining he was just being honest about his frustrations; by every pre-teen girl who has ever frozen out a friend for three weeks to process her emotions.
Rogers was essentially Jean-Jacques Rousseau with a therapy license and better office furniture. Strip away the constraints, remove the external authorities, trust the inner voice — and behold, the flourishing human person. This, as the IHM sisters were about to discover, was catastrophically, spectacularly, and with tragical thoroughness, wrong.
Coulson and his colleagues set to work with the bright confidence that novelty qualifies as insight, a very easy mistake to make if you have a clipboard and a grant. Within two years, the IHM community began to unravel like a carefully knitted sweater encountering a determined housecat.
Six hundred women had been encouraged to consult their inner selves. And their inner selves, it turned out, had opinions. About the veil. About the habit. About obedience. The inner self, when “freed”, had no time for Church, community, others, love.
The order began to collapse. Attrition gutted the community. Most of its schools closed. The IHM’s were not alone. Similar programs run by Coulson and Rogers left a comparable trail of vocational wreckage through Jesuit and other religious communities up and down the West Coast. It was, in terms of institutional devastation per encounter group, a remarkably efficient operation.
Coulson himself eventually issued a public apology — and his words are worth sitting with. He said: “We overcame their traditions, we overcame their faith.” He also said, “I know we did a lot of damage.”
Rogers had constructed an entire therapeutic system with no category for sin — no mechanism for recognizing that some of what is “deepest within you” might be, how shall I put this with appropriate pastoral delicacy, not your best self.
The IHM disaster is, in short, a controlled experiment in applied Pelagianism. It is what happens when you take the ancient Christian conviction that human nature is wounded, disordered, and genuinely in need of redemption and replace it with the cheerful therapeutic assumption that human nature just needs a little more room to breathe. Pelagius, for his part, was condemned by a council in 418 AD. Rogers was given the American Psychological Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 1972. Make of that what you will.
It is also, as it happens, the oldest trick in the book. Literally.
In Genesis, the serpent begins with a question designed to reframe reality from the inside out: “Did God really say…?” He is not attacking the command. He is destabilizing the commander. He is, in the precise vocabulary of humanistic psychology, inviting Eve to interrogate the external authority that has been inhibiting her authentic self-expression.
Notice the reframing at work. God’s original word is one of abundance: “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden.” Freedom comes first; generosity sets the stage. But when Eve repeats the command to the serpent, the emphasis has quietly shifted: “We may not eat…” The gift has been edited into a rule. The open garden has narrowed into a single fence line. The serpent hasn’t lied yet. He hasn’t needed to. He asked one mildly skeptical question and waited while the human imagination did the rest. Once you accept the premise that the One who loves you is primarily the One who limits you, obedience stops sounding like trust and starts feeling like servitude. Rogers could not have framed it better himself.
The serpent convinced two people that what was deepest within them was more trustworthy than the One who had made them.
What Adam and Eve discovered on the other side of the fruit was not self-actualization. It was shame. They did not become more vividly themselves — they became, for the first time, desperately self-conscious. Rogers promised flourishing through authenticity. The serpent promised godlike enlightenment. The text records instead that they immediately began sewing outfits out of leaves, which is not the behavior of people experiencing personal empowerment. The inner self had spoken. It turned out to need a tailor.
Now let us jump to Matthew’s Gospel. Jesus, having been baptized, is led into the desert for forty days. Forty days echoes Israel’s forty years in the wilderness. The desert is the place where the question of human identity gets answered, one way or another.
The first temptation, turn stones to bread, is the temptation to meet legitimate need through illegitimate means, on your own timeline, by your own power. Jesus has been fasting. He is genuinely hungry. There is nothing wrong with bread. The wrong is in the reaching, the assumption that the Son of God should not have to wait on the Father’s provision. This is the therapeutic model in its purest form: the self has a need, the self should meet the need, and anything or anyone standing between the need and its satisfaction is an obstacle to flourishing.
The second temptation is subtler. Satan quotes Scripture (Psalm 91, a psalm of divine protection), inviting Jesus to put it to the test. Throw yourself off the Temple. Make God prove his love. This is the therapeutic demand translated into theological terms: I will trust when I have been shown sufficient evidence of trustworthiness. I will commit when the relationship has demonstrated its reliability. I will believe when believing has been made comfortable. Jesus counters with Deuteronomy 6:16: “You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.” The verse refers to Massah, where Israel demanded proof that God was still present before they would continue following. Demanding proof of love before extending trust is not intimacy. It is leverage. It is, when you think about it, the precise opposite of faith.
The third temptation drops all subtlety. Satan shows Jesus all the kingdoms of the world. The mission, minus the suffering. The victory apart from the cross. All it requires is one small act of worship. The shortcut. The therapeutic hack. The way to get to your actualized self without going through the suffering that the Father has appointed. In a culture that has made the elimination of discomfort into a spiritual discipline, this temptation is not ancient. It’s simply Tuesday.
Jesus refuses the temptations with three passages from Deuteronomy, three refusals rooted not in willpower but in identity; an identity shaped by the Word of God so thoroughly that the self’s legitimate desires, however real and however pressing, do not get to be the final word.
This is not self-actualization. This is something infinitely more demanding and infinitely more liberating. This is what the tradition calls virtue, and it is precisely what Carl Rogers had no category for.
The serpent’s question still circulates: Did God really say? It now arrives through a culture with its own catechism: authenticity over formation, expression over self-gift, interior life as oracle rather than patient. We have all absorbed more of this than we know. We are all, to some extent, more Rogerian, more Pelagian than we realize.
Lent is not about suppressing the self; it is about moving it out of the driver’s seat. The authentic self is not liberated by promoting every desire but by introducing those desires to their Maker. Willpower alone cannot carry this — if sheer determination worked, most of us would already be saints by mid-February, the IHM’s would have been ok. The Lenten path is simpler and harder: receive the Word, let it sink in, live it out. Not a fence around freedom, but the framework that keeps it from collapsing.
The Joy of the Gospel 