Where the Psyche Ends and the Soul Begins

This is an AI-generated image.

Last week, my friend invited me to an event hosted by a church. I listened to the author of a new book called Friendish speak about the nature of Christian friendship and how it should differ from non-Christian friendship. At one point, she said that Christians should “satisfy their relational needs” through their relationship with God rather than their friendships. This raised a question for me, which unfortunately the Q&A didn’t address. How does a Christian determine whether their relational dissatisfaction is due to their inadequate relationship with God or a psychological problem? This is a variation of a more general question about the line between the psyche and the soul. 

If a Christian is relationally dissatisfied and the problem is in their relationship with God, then their distress is a spiritual problem in their soul. I’m not a Christian, but I fully recognize the reality of this type of problem. I prefer to talk about it as a moral problem with someone’s moral character or as a problem in their relationship with their ideal lifestyle. Semantics aside, practically everyone believes it’s possible to have this type of problem. You can be selfish, prideful, lazy, impatient, etc. without having psychological problems. 

However, it’s also possible that specific problems that could be categorized as spiritual/moral are actually psychological in nature. Your impatience may indicate that you need to learn how to be more patient, but it could also be a symptom of undiagnosed ADHD. The expansion of mental health classifications has further complicated this already fraught distinction. Maybe you have a moral problem with patience, maybe you have slight ADHD. The distinction is clearer when considering extreme cases. Schizophrenia is marked by hallucinatory breaks with reality, and bipolar disorder by manic episodes. These conditions may have been understood in terms of spiritual disorder or demon possession in the past, but modern medicine has revealed their psychological reality. 

Problems historically interpreted as moral/spiritual in nature are often retroactively reclassified as psychic issues after material solutions emerge. This reclassification process has gained speed and popularity with the growth of the psychological industry, the decline in religiosity, and the popularization of prescription and recreational drug use. Psychology today is so mainstream that nearly every problem can be easily psychologized, or quickly associated with a potential mental health diagnosis and a form of psychological treatment. 

Those concerned about both their mental health and the development of their moral character (or their spiritual relationship with God) are increasingly confronted by ambiguity when trying to categorize and address personal problems. Maybe I’m morally/spiritually ungrateful and need to spend more time reflecting on the good in life, maybe I need that ketamine treatment for depression I saw advertised on Instagram. How can I tell what kind of problem I’m having without trying both options? Am I leaning toward ketamine because the evidence suggests my problem is likely psychological or because ketamine sounds more fun than practicing gratitude? Ambiguity compounds. 

The classificatory ambiguity has been and is weaponized by greedy psychologists, opportunistic religious figures, pharmaceutical companies, therapy companies, oppressive governments, and everyday people who just don’t want to hear about your problems. It spawned the anti-psychiatry movement during the 1960s. Philosophers like Michel Foucault criticized how mental illnesses were culturally constructed to further oppress already socially marginal people like gays and lesbians. Thomas Szasz wrote the controversial book The Myth of Mental Illness, which explicitly reframed psychiatric diagnoses as “problems in living.” The movement generally argued that mental illness terms are metaphors for disagreeable lifestyles rather than words for empirically real psychological problems. It succeeded in that it led to mass psychiatric deinstitutionalization, but obviously failed and arguably backfired in its mission to disempower drug companies and psychologists. Today, therapeutic and pharmaceutical treatments are ubiquitous and their associated industries are growing. BetterHelp is competing with your local pastor to define and address your problems. 

In a monoculture, the line between the psyche and the soul is obvious. For example, serious psychological problems go unrecognized as psychological problems in many fundamentalist Catholic households. They are labeled spiritual problems or demon possessions and sufferers are told to go to confession. On the other hand, spiritual/moral problems are overly psychologized in high-income progressive households. Parents are too quick to take their misbehaving children to psychologists and put them on drugs instead of trying new disciplinary techniques. The children learn to psychologize their problems instead of discipline themselves and are set on lifelong journeys of new diagnoses and treatments. To avoid both extremes, moral/spiritual culture must be balanced with psychological culture. 

The speaker at the friendship event spoke of “the culture” and “the world” in stereotypically Christian (and culty) fashion. She used these terms to refer to something like “the culture that is the opposite of Christian culture.” Her Christian audience no doubt understood her meaning, but this language oversimplifies things. For one, it falsely implies that all non-Christians embody anti-Christian culture and thereby greatly exaggerates its relevance. The subtler and bigger concern is that speaking that way about “culture” suggests Christian people have, or should have, one culture. If that were so, then Christians wouldn’t, or shouldn’t, get caught up in cultural conflicts between spiritual/moral cultures and psychological culture. They wouldn’t wrestle with the question of whether the personal problems they are facing are better categorized and addressed spiritually/morally or psychologically. Given the risks of monocultural excess and the opportunities afforded by cultural diversification, it’s better to try to balance cultures instead of being fundamentalist about any one of them. Plus, it’s extremely difficult, if not downright impossible, to live a monocultural lifestyle in a multicultural society in which priests and preachers coexist with psychologists and pharmaceuticals. The postmodernism Christians lament isn’t a philosophy as much as a set of sociological facts about the complexity of living in a multicultural environment without clear ways of deciding when to embrace which culture. 

The line between the psyche and the soul is an economic competition and an ideological distinction, but most of all it’s a practical barrier for people like me who are interested in being both morally good and psychologically healthy. How does a Christian determine whether their relational dissatisfaction is due to their inadequate relationship with God or a psychological problem? Good answers to that difficult question would help everyone, Christians and non-Christians alike, balance competing moral and psychological cultures and find better solutions for their personal problems.