For His Doctoral Thesis, Schweitzer Chose To Write On Recent Medical Treatises Which Showed, At Least To The Authors' Satisfaction, That Jesus Was Mentally Diseased. The Book Was Published In German In 1913.
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Historic Impact,
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This review is from: The Psychiatric Study of Jesus: Exposition and Criticism (The Beacon Press Schweitzer Series) (Paperback)
At the turn of the 20th Century, Freud was (forever) changing our view of personality and the infant field of Psychology was being born under the philosophic eye of William James. Into the mix came the exhaustic study by Schweitzer of the Quest for Jesus. So it is not surprising that a half dozen books promptly appeared which sought to explain Jesus' personality using these newly invented ideas. The 3 most famous books came from Germany (George de Loosten), France (Charles Binet Sangle), and the US (William Hirsch), and they concluded that Jesus was mentally unstable, specifically, paranoid. Interestingly enough they relied on Schweitzer's 1901 book to make their claims, so the mortified humanitarian produced this brief book to counter their claims (and deal with his guilt).
The Psychiatric Study of Jesus is not so much a study of anything, as it is a refutation of the theories of the aforementioned authors. Schweitzer does a good job of summarizing their arguments and then systematically refuting each. The impact of Schweitzer's book is clear from the fact that in the next 100 years there were as many books written on this subject as in the first 10 years of the 20th Century - in other words, after Schweitzer's book appeared almost no one else took up the subject. The book is well written (it is Schweitzer, after all), but modern scholars will find the documentation sorely lacking and the interpretations are fairly naive. Moreover, Schweitzer offers us very little of his opinions about Jesus's mental status, apart from the arguments against his psychopathology. But these shortcomings pale in comparison with the historic value of the book. In brief, this book can be enjoyed by almost anyone with an interest in Jesus.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
STILL A VERY VALUABLE RESOURCE ABOUT JESUS (AND SCHWEITZER!),
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This review is from: The psychiatric study of Jesus,: Exposition and criticism; (Paperback)
You probably already know that Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965) was a famous theologian, philosopher, and organist before he decided to become a medical missionary to Lambaréné in west central Africa. This brief book was actually his doctoral thesis upon completing his medical training. (The translator notes that "On several occasions he was on the point of choosing an easier subject for his thesis.") It was first published in book form in 1913.
Psychotherapy was a "new" subject then, and several persons took it upon themselves to attempt a "medical diagnosis" of Jesus of Nazareth, and actually concluded that Jesus was mentally deranged/diseased. One of their key arguments was that Jesus believed that the world was going to end within his lifetime (a viewpoint which, ironically, Schweitzer helped foster). Schweitzer wrote his thesis to refute several such writers. In his Foreward, Dr. Winfred Overholser (then President of the American Psychiatric Association) cautions, "Two general comments may be made on psychiatric diagnosis. First, one must have a good case history. In the case of Jesus, we have virtually none.... Furthermore, we know nothing except by tradition of any but the last year or so (at the most) of Jesus' life, and in all accounts there is a gap of at least 18 years. We know little of his relationship with his mother and siblings and, while we know something of the multifarious social, religious and economic influences of the time, we know very little of the manner in which they played upon him and moulded his feelings and reactions. The perils of diagnosis 'a distance' are great!" Among Schweitzer's conclusions are these: "(A) number of acts and utterances of Jesus impress the (critical) authors as pathological because the latter are too little acquainted with the contemporary thought of the time to be able to do justice to it." "From these false preceptions and with the help of entirely hypothetical symptoms, they construct pictures of sickness which are themselves artifacts and which, moreover, cannot be made to conform exactly with the clinical forms of sickness diagnosed by the authors." "The only symptoms to be accepted as historical and possibly to be discussed from the psychiatric point of view--the high estimate which Jesus has of himself and perhaps also the hallucination at the baptism--fall far short of proving the existence of mental illness." I would highly recommend this book to anyone intersted in Jesus, as well as his "psychology." (It's also revealing in terms of Schweitzer's own ideas, as well.)
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