Who Is O. Hobart Mowrer and Why Does He Matter to Biblical Counselors?
Greg Gifford is Chair of Biblical Studies and Assistant Professor of Biblical Counseling at The Master’s University. In a post at the Biblical Counseling Coalition (Jay Adams’ Heritage: How Jay Adams Is Connected to the Father of American Psychology), Gifford summarizes who O. Hobart Mowrer was, and why he is important to modern biblical counselors.
“O.H. Mowrer was an American psychologist and professor of psychology at the University of Illinois who lived from 1907 to 1982. He is known for behavior therapy and two-stage theory, something that had great significance in the ministry of Jay Adams. Mowrer was a man who was willing to challenge the status quo of then-modern psychological practices, much like Adams. Mowrer was one who did not see eye-to-eye with his behavioristic predecessors and was willing to publicly challenge and critique them—something that Adams appreciated in Mowrer.”
For more on the life and work of Mowrer, see The Curious Career of O. Hobart Mowrer by Corbin Page.
Jay Adams and O. Hobart Mowrer
Jay Adams said of Mowrer’s impact on his thinking:
“I read some of Mowrer’s works, including The Crisis in Psychiatry and Religion, and The New Group Therapy, which he had just published. These books astounded me. Mowrer had gone far beyond my own thinking. He was flatly challenging the very existence of institutionalized psychiatry. He stated outright that the current psychiatric dogmas were false.…”
“Reading Mowrer’s book, The Crisis in Psychiatry and Religion, as I said, was an earth-shattering experience.…”
“From my protracted involvement with the inmates of the mental institutions at Kankakee and Galesburg [where Adams’s spent six weeks, 24/7, studying under Mowrer], I was convinced that most of them were there, as I said, not because they were sick, but because they were sinful.…”
“I came home deeply indebted to Mowrer for indirectly driving me to a conclusion that I as a Christian minister should have known all along, namely, that many of the ‘mentally ill’ are people who can be helped by the ministry of God’s Word” (Competent to Counsel, xiv-xviii).
My Interest
Many new books and booklets are releasing on the theme of “A Biblical Evaluation of…” I am researching, and hoping to write:
A Biblical Evaluation of the Influences on Jay Adams and His Launch of the Modern Nouthetic Counseling Movement (or some-such title—probably much shorter).
Currently, I’m reading scores of primary source writings from Adams, Mowrer, Glasser, Bettler, Powlison, and others—gaining a first-hand account and understanding of the influences on Jay Adams. (So far I already have well over 400 pages of single-spaced research notes.)
Today’s post, focused on Mowrer, is a small slice of that early research. To my knowledge, no biblical counselor has ever done a comprehensive biblical evaluation of Mowrer’s model.
My intent and purpose is simply to allow the primary source writings of Adams and Mowrer to speak for themselves. I have no built-in assumptions or agenda about where this primary source research might lead.
Some of the questions I want my research on Mowrer and Adams to address include:
- What was Mowrer’s model?
- In what way(s), if any, did Mowrer’s model impact Jay Adams’s thinking and approach as he developed the modern nouthetic counseling movement?
- From Adams’s approach to Mowrer, what might we learn today about how biblical counselors might engage (or not engage) with secular approaches to psychology and counseling?
Preliminary Thoughts
In today’s post I’m sharing just a very preliminary summary of my understanding of Mowrer’s perspective from his book, The Crisis in Psychiatry and Religion, originally published in 1961. It has been eye-opening to read it firsthand, for the first time. I’ve come to label Mowrer’s approach:
Man-Made, Man-Centered Secular Moral Behavioral Psychology.
Or, a bit longer label:
A Man-Made, Man-Centered Model of Secular Moral Behavioral Psychology: Mandated Confession and Admonished Self-Atonement.
Mowrer and Freud: A VERY Broad Summary
Mowrer critiqued Freudian psychoanalysis as ignoring true guilt. Mowrer disagreed with Freud’s assessment that neurosis and psychosis were caused by repressed false guilt that needed to be treated by insight and awareness so the person could escape from religion’s false guilt and society’s false moralism. (As I indicated, this is a very general summation.)
Adams often quoted Mowrer’s now famous words regarding Freud and Christianity.
“Has evangelical religion sold its birthright for a mess of psychological pottage?”
The “psychological pottage,” according to Mowrer, was Freud’s focus on false guilt which Mowrer said led to blame shifting. “Psychological truth,” for Mowrer, demanded a focus on true guilt and moral responsibility. As we’ll see later, Mowrer viewed everything through the lens of the suppression of real guilt.
Clearly, Mowrer was anti-Freudian psychoanalysis. And clearly, Adams resonated with Mowrer’s perspective on Freud, and with Mowrer’s perspective on moral responsibility.
As Heath Lambert explained in his dissertation (The Theological Development of the Biblical Counseling Movement from 1988):
“Adams’s work underlines the important biblical truth of man as a responsible sinner…. Mowrer’s emphasis on responsibility awakened Adams to this crucial reality” (65).
Mowrer and Christianity
What we often don’t hear is what Mowrer believed and taught instead of Freudianism. Perhaps a contrast would help:
- Mowrer taught that psychoanalysis was justification by insight—and that this was unhelpful because it denied the reality of real guilt and actual sin.
- Mowrer taught that Protestant Christianity was justification by faith—and that this was the wrong way to deal with real guilt and sin. Mowrer identified confession to God in the hopes of Divine forgiveness as “cheap grace.” Man had to do something to atone for his sin.
- Mowrer’s man-centered, man-dependent model for dealing with guilt was justification by works—and he falsely claimed this was the right way to deal with guilt and atone for sin.
Specifically related to Reformed Christianity:
- Mowrer saw Reformed Calvinistic Protestant teaching as equally as wrong and harmful as Freudian psychology.
- Mowrer said that justification by grace alone through faith alone was complicit in causing the rise of mental illness!
- Mowrer rejected Paul’s New Testament writings because of Paul’s teaching on salvation by grace through faith.
- Mowrer spoke positively of James, and he claimed that it taught salvation by works.
- Mowrer aligned somewhat with the Catholic approach to confession and penance, as well as with the Mormon approach to confession and works. However, Mowrer did not see those religious approaches as going far enough.
Crisis in Psychiatry AND Religion
Think about the title of Mowrer’s book: Crisis in Psychiatry and Religion. According to Mowrer:
- The crisis in psychiatry was Freud’s doctrine of imagined guilt that resulted in diminishing human responsibility.
- The crisis in religion was the Reformation doctrine of salvation by grace that, according to Mowrer, resulted in diminishing human ability for dealing with true guilt!
As Corbin Page notes:
“Psychologists were not the only targets of Mowrer’s ire. He also expressed a strong dislike of John Calvin, believing that the Calvinist doctrine of predestination was nearly as debilitating as Freud’s determinism (Mowrer, 1961c, p. 159). The Apostle Paul was also labeled a pernicious influence. Mowrer believed that the Pauline doctrine of justification by faith was inferior to the doctrine of good works that he found in the book of James (Mowrer, 1961c, pp. 185–189). However, Mowrer did not offer theological arguments against either Calvin or Paul. Instead, he offered psychological arguments” (19).
Mowrer in His Own Words: Christ’s Grace Is a “Heresy”!
If we have not read Mowrer firsthand, we might falsely be led to believe that the crisis in religion was that pastors were depending on Freud. That was only a minor part of Mowrer’s perspective. Mowrer’s primary concern was that Protestants were relying on Luther, Calvin, grace, and faith—and ignoring the need for human works to deal effectively with real guilt!
As I noted, I have over 250-pages of research notes already. So today’s post is just the proverbial “tip of the iceberg.” Here are just a few firsthand, primary source quotes from Mowrer in The Crisis in Psychiatry and Religion.
According to Mowrer, “…the Reformation, by its deficiencies and anomalies actually produced psychoanalysis” (156).
Mowrer wrote The Crisis in Psychiatry and Religion “…in revolt against the denial and debasement of human responsibility which have been foisted upon us alike by Calvinist theology and Freudian psychoanalysis…” (vi).
Mowrer double-downs on his contention that the biblical, Protestant doctrine of justification by grace alone through faith alone is the core problem of modern humanity.
“Grace, it was argued, is not dependent upon other men but comes from God alone. Therefore, you were to take your case to God, in prayer, and ask for his forgiveness directly, without priestly intervention…. This new provision for a short-cut to God and absolution was supposedly a great innovation, liberation, and triumph. But history may yet show that it was instead a grim and costly error. There can surely be no denying that, on the whole, Protestantism has handled the problem of guilt very badly. It has left its followers in a state which perhaps made them ‘creative’ and ‘ambitious’ in a feverish, unhealthy way; but it has also disposed us to the mass neurosis and pervasive anxiety which are so much a part of the modern scene” (106).
“I, personally, take my stand with the Apostle James and Deitrich Bonhoeffer, against the Apostle Paul and Martin Luther” (109).
“One is little short of dazzled by the possibilities that seem to lie before us if, for a change, we were to take guilt seriously and at the same time worked out ways of dealing with it which are more realistic and effective than those which have characterized Protestantism…” (128).
“Occasionally I have been invited to expatiate on the concept of Original Sin. If I allowed myself to do so, I would really lay myself open to the charge from theologians of practicing their profession without a license. But, for whatever it may be worth, my untutored layman’s opinion is that this doctrine [Original Sin] is nonsense, as is that of the Substitutionary Atonement, and has done much harm in the world” (147).
“They proclaim certain tenets of Protestant doctrine, particularly of a Calvinist stripe, from their pulpits, but seem completely unimpressed that this doctrine is not saving them, much less the persons to whom they ostensibly minister. They preach justification by faith and roundly condemn ‘good works,’ and seemingly take no account of how poorly this doctrine itself works, in the lives of modern men and women” (157-158).
Mowrer then summarizes his complete disdain for justification by grace alone through faith alone—calling it “perversity”!
“Calvinist Protestantism has said to us: ‘You are responsible for your redemption, but you are incapable of being equally responsible for your redemption. God condemns you for your evil, but He will pay no attention to your own efforts to redeem yourself and will Himself save you or not, according to His inscrutable pleasure.’ This, I submit, is a psychological and human absurdity and a Christian deviation and perversity” (160).
In fact, Mowrer labels Christ’s grace a “heresy”!
“The Calvinist doctrine of the guilt of man and the grace of God has been a heresy which has produced despair, anger, and madness” (181).
Mowrer summarizes his thesis on the last page of The Crisis in Psychiatry and Religion. Speaking of a person who “has had a nervous ‘breakdown,’” and has “lost his balance, become unstable…” Mowrer asks,
“What, now can a person in such a predicament do to be ‘saved’? It would appear that two equally misleading answers have been given to this question in our time. Protestant theology has preached a doctrine of ‘justification by faith.’ Place your trust in God and believe on Jesus Christ, we have been urged, and your sins will be immediately forgiven. And for those who prefer a ‘scientific’ rather than a ‘religious’ approach, there has been the doctrine of ‘justification by insight.’ In the latter approach, one comes to see that his sins are not real and that he doesn’t really need forgiveness. It is hard to determine which of these doctrines has been more pernicious” (231-232).
Mowrer’s Prescription
In Mowrer’s prescription for addressing true guilt and actual sin, he emphasized the self-atoning work of penance.
“For those who are now disillusioned regarding both of these easy ways to ‘salvation,’ it is beginning to appear that ‘the way’ is indeed hard and the gate narrow. Emotionally disturbed persons have not talked themselves into their difficulties, they have acted, misbehaved; and many are now persuaded that one likewise cannot talk (or pray) himself out of them. It is surely unrepentant and unredeemed evil actions that destroy our self-respect and moral credit; and one can hardly escape the conclusion that these cannot be recaptured by any means other than compensating good actions and deeds” (The Crisis in Psychiatry and Religion, 232).
Mowrer’s model of secular behavioral psychology emphasized the method of admonishing people to admit their true guilt to one another and then exhorting people to do specific works of restitution. Mowrer’s treatment was a man-centered, grace-rejecting, secular, moralistic, behavioral psychology model. Mowrer believed in self-atonement as the way to handle guilt and sin.
Donald Krill, in a 1965 review, pointed out that Mowrer’s approach seemed more related to his own personality than to any well-thought-out system. Krill’s primary critique was theological. Mowrer, he wrote, “is describing essentially the religion of the Pharisees, one of rules, self-perfection, and social conformity” (Krill, 1965, pp. 30, 32; cited in Corbin Page, 22).
In summary:
- Mowrer believed that the concept of Christ’s atonement for our sin and guilt did not truly address sin and a guilty conscience, and instead led to neurosis and psychosis!
- Mowrer saw confession to God as ineffectual.
- Mowrer insisted on confession to one another and on works of self-atonement, penance, and restitution as effectual to address sin and guilt.
Mowrer’s Secular Psychological Model: Viewing Everything Through the Lens of Suppression of Sin
Mowrer viewed life through the lens of suppression of sin. He viewed any attempt to label struggles as false guilt, or to label them as suffering, as a form of denial that led people to take on a victim mentality. This led Mowrer to see all mental illness, including schizophrenia, as due to suppression of sin and true guilt.
Mowrer’s focus on suppression of sin also led him to see victims of incest, not as victims, but as personally responsible and morally culpable. In one long case study, Mowrer addressed the treatment of a young woman who had been repeatedly sexually abused by her father when she was a child—incestuous rape. Mowrer chided a Freudian counselor for treating this woman as someone dealing with repressed false guilt.
What was Mowrer’s suggested treatment of this victim of incestuous rape? He said she needed to acknowledge and confess her guilt and sin of incestuous sex with her father when she was a child. In Mowrer’s mind, she was not a sufferer or victim of her father’s sin. Instead, she was a morally culpable sinner in the hands of her guilt-ridden conscience.
The Personal Genesis of Mowrer’s Psychological Suppression Theory
Where did Mowrer’s “everything is repressed true guilt” approach originate? It found its genesis in Mowrer’s own personal experience of seeking to remedy his personal sense of a guilty conscience.
From Mowrer’s own testimony, he struggled with depression, neurosis, and psychosis off and on from his teen years and throughout his adult life until his death by suicide in 1982 at the age of seventy-five. Mowrer intimated that he struggled throughout his life with homosexual desires—and that this was the source of his real guilt.
His self-diagnosis? His efforts to suppress his guilt was the source of his depression and mental illnesses.
His self-cure? After one lengthy hospitalization in a mental institution, Mowrer finally confessed his homosexual urges (what today would be called same-sex attraction). This led to great psychological relief—temporarily.
Mowrer’s depression and mental illness returned, and he was again hospitalized. He then found greater relief in almost indiscriminate confession of his guilt to everyone who would listen.
Mowrer and his wife together started integrity groups as a method and model for encouraging troubled people to confess their sins to one another. Group members were mandated to confess their sins to each other and then admonished to de-habituate from their sin and relieve their true guilt by doing works of self-atonement, penance, and restitution.
And Now You Know…The Rest of the Story
Yes, O. Hobart Mowrer, was anti-Freud.
Sadly, O. Hobart Mowrer was also stridently anti-Christianity.
Jay Adams on Mowrer
Obviously, Jay Adams disagreed with Mowrer’s anti-Christian philosophy/theology of life. In Competent to Counsel, Adams states:
“Let me append one final word about Mowrer. I want to say clearly, once and for all, that I am not a disciple of Mowrer or William Glasser (a writer in the Mowrer tradition)….
I stand far off from them. . . .
Their presuppositional stance must be rejected totally. Christians may thank God that in his providence he has used Mowrer and others to awaken us to the fact that the “mentally ill” can be helped….
Biblical counseling cannot be an imposition of Mowrer’s or Glasser’s views (or mine) upon Scripture.”
Some Preliminary Reflections…
My first reading of Mowrer has raised for me the important and relevant question:
To what extent might anti-Freud writings be useful for a biblical counselor, even as a catalyst, if those writings are embedded in a man-made, man-dependent, anti-grace, anti-faith, anti-Christ, secular, moral, behavioristic, humanistic, self-atonement psychology model?
Or, asked differently:
How much does a foolish foundation impact every aspect of a person’s psychological perspective, and what cautions should this raise for us as biblical counselors?
How much can we agree with and promote someone’s anti-psychology view (the co-belligerent approach) when their foundational views are anti-Christian?
Does common grace allow for some seeds of “truth” even in the midst of extensive evidence of the noetic effect of sin?
Addendum: What Have Others Said?
I wrestled with the best wording of the title for this post. Is “influence” the best word? Would the word “impacted” be better…or worse? Perhaps “catalyzed” would be an appropriate word, since Jay Adams used that word…?
I chose “influence,” in part, because of Dr. Adams’s own descriptions (see above), and because of assessments by other leaders in the modern biblical counseling world. In this addendum, I’ll share briefly from three of those leaders (Greg Gifford, David Powlison, and George Schwab).
Gifford on Adams and Mowrer
In Gifford’s Biblical Counseling Coalition post on Adams and Mowrer, in a section entitled, Mowrer’s Relationship and Influence on Jay Adams, Gifford writes:
“While Mowrer was teaching at the University of Illinois, Jay Adams corresponded with him and eventually spent a summer studying under Mowrer in 1965. During this time, Adams said, ‘This was an unforgettable experience for which I shall always be grateful.’ Although Mowrer was not a believer, Adams found that Mowrer’s challenge of mental illness, call for personal responsibility, understanding of the medical model of counseling, and introduction of moral problems being termed as sin to be refreshing. Through this exposure to Mowrer, Jay Adams was provided with the impetus that he needed to launch his articulation of what Scripture said about counseling and how Mowrer’s disagreement with counseling was partially correct, but yet still unbiblical. Mowrer was not the only influence regarding Jay Adams’s theory of counseling, but he was one of the most direct influences as seen in the above comments (Competent to Counsel, xv-xvii).
After this teaching experience with Mowrer, Adams began his work in writing Competent to Counsel, which would be published just five years later in 1970. It was a landmark work that helped solidify Jay Adams’s emphasis on directive counseling, human responsibility, and—of course—what he would term ‘nouthetic confrontation.’ Jay Adams was influenced by William James’s student—O.H. Mowrer—and that contrasting exposure helped Adams formulate what we now understand to be ‘biblical counseling.”
Reflecting on Mowrer and the birth of the modern nouthetic counseling movement, Corbin Page writes,
“The biblical counseling movement represented the culmination of the earlier conservative distrust of psychoanalysis and clinical psychology. Now the conservatives had an organized response rather than mere complaints. It was the fulfillment of Mowrer’s vision of treating mental disorders with the Bible rather than psychological concepts. Ironically, this response, which stressed that psychologists had no special authority, had its origins in the writings of one of the most eminent secular psychologists of the 20th century” (22).
Powlison on Adams and Mowrer
David Powlison, in The Biblical Counseling Movement: History and Context, summarizes the impact of Mowrer on Adams.
“Mowrer’s moral framework, conversional intent, direct manner, and polemic against the dominant models dovetailed with many of Adams’s existing commitments, discontents, successes, failures, and gropings….
Mowrer had given Adams the contours of a counseling model and had set him in motion….
During 1965-66, Adams began implementing what he had learned from Mowrer and what he was discovering in the Bible. He did counseling in his own church, experimenting with more intentional probing of counselee’s lives and more directive methods of addressing the problems discovered” (36, 37).
Schwab on Adams and Mowrer
In 2003, The Journal of Biblical Counseling published an article by George M. Schwab (Ph.D. Old Testament Professor at Erskine Theological Seminary) entitled, “Critique of ‘Habituation’ as a Biblical Model of Change.” In the article, Schwab compares Adams’s conceptual ideas with those of Mowrer and Glasser.
Schwab also examines Adams’s exegetical work related to the concept of habituation. Schwab proposes:
“The stimulus for Jay Adams’s theory of habit also came from outside the Bible. Adams admits that what radicalized him—what set him free from Rogers and Freud—was the influence of particular secular psychologists, O. Hobart Mowrer and William Glasser. However, Adams claims that the Bible is sufficient for counseling, and that all so-called psychological insights must stand the test of Scripture. Yet, some of his ‘Bible-based’ theories and emphases seem almost identical to those of his secular predecessors. Was part of the ‘grid’ through which Adams reads the Bible supplied by these secularists? Is this why some strands of Adams’s work sound so cognate to secular writings?” (68).
Schwab outlines his approach to studying Mowrer and Adams:
“In what follows, I will first show the similarities between Jay Adams and his secular contemporaries. Adams originally adopted his view of ‘habit’ from secular psychological models and then worked it into a more or less biblical framework. This raises the question of how much influence the secular movement has had upon Adams’s approach to the Bible. Second, I will explore whether his view of habituation does justice to the Bible. Finally, I will draw some conclusions about the implications this study has for the biblical counseling movement, while illustrating the functioning of the hermeneutical spiral” (68).
At the end of his article, Schwab summarizes his assessment. His evaluation is that Adams took the insights of Mowrer and Glasser and:
“…then reworked them into a formal theory that was informed by Christian doctrine, particularly certain aspects of the doctrine of man. ‘Responsibility’ was corrected to be with respect to God; the confrontational approach became the ministry of ‘nouthesia’; habit became ‘manner of life’ lived before God; and habituation became the ‘put on, put off’ dynamic in the power of the Holy Spirit. This explicit borrowing and partial reworking is particularly the case with the object of our inquiry, ‘habituation’ (82).
Commenting on Schwab’s assessment of Adams’s approach to habituation and his understanding of the biblical term “flesh,” Heath Lambert remarks:
“Schwab establishes that the origins of Adams’s thinking were found in secular psychological theories, not in specific texts of Scripture.” In other words, Schwab shows that the problem—cited by Welch—of Adams’s understanding of the term ‘flesh’ was imposed by Adams on the biblical text, and actually derived from the influence of unbelieving people” (The Theological Development of the Biblical Counseling Movement from 1988, 73-74).
A Final Word
I’m open to ongoing feedback on the appropriate word to use for the title of this post…
My main desire in this post is not about Mowrer’s possible impact/influence on Adams.
My main purpose today is to educate us about Mowrer’s staunchly anti-grace, anti-justification-by-faith worldview.
