SESSION 11Religion and Mental Illness
Post your comments for discussion to "XI. Religion and Mental Illness" in the Discussion Board.
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SESSION 11Religion and Mental Illness
Post your comments for discussion to "XI. Religion and Mental Illness" in the Discussion Board.
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The
thesis of Miller's book is that the violence of humans against one
another is rooted in misguided child-rearing practices. As she had
written in her earlier book, The Drama of the Gifted Child,
when children's needs for the respect and protection of adults who take
them seriously, love them, and honestly help them to become oriented in
the world are frustrated and when, instead, children are exploited,
punished, manipulated, neglected, or deceived for the sake of adults'
needs, children will be seriously injured, they will suppress their
feelings of pain, repress the memory of the injuries done to them, and,
as adults, they will exploit their own children to meet their own unmet
childhood needs, just as their parents had exploited them. They will be
subjected to a "poisonous pedagogy" that fills the needs of
parents, not of their children. She concludes that children need
emotional and physical support, not pedagogy, from their parents.
Pruyser outlines a variety of mental pathologies that relate to
particular religious doctrines. How do you define the role that churches
should play in the nurturance of healthy, wholesome, happy, and
productive human beings? Be specific.