Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Hobart Mowrer

Hobart Mowrer, psychologist from Harvard and Yale, and once upon a time president of the American Psychological Association, who ended up committing suicide himself, said:

For several decades, we psychologists looked upon the whole matter of sin and moral accountability as a great incubus, and acclaimed our liberation from it as epoch-making. But at length we have discovered that to be free from sin is also to have the excuse of being sick, rather than being sinful. [We are in] danger of becoming lost. This danger is, I believe, betokened by the widespread interest in existentialism, which we are presently witnessing. In becoming amoral, ethically neutral, and free, we have cut the very roots of our being, lost our deepest sense of selfhood and identity, and with neurotics themselves find ourselves asking, "Who am I? What is my deepest destiny?"

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