ELWOOD WORCESTER
Many of Worcester's Books including his Emmanuel books
and faith and health books are available on Google books for free reading
They are also on www.librarything.com
No. 1634
ELWOOD WORCESTER (David Freeman8, David7, Noah6, Noah5, Francis4, Francis3, Samuel2, William1) b Massilon, Oh., May 16, 1862; m Aug. 7, 1894, s. Bethlehem, Pa., Blanche Stanley, dau Bishop Rulison. Episcopal clergyman, Boston, Mass. Prepared for college, Rochester, NY; Columbia College, A.B., 1886; General Theological College, NY, 1887; University of Leipsic (A.M., Ph.D.), 1889; S.T.D., Hobart College, D.D., (?) Professor of Philosophy and Chaplain of Lehigh University, 1890-96; Rector of St. Stephen’s Church, Phila., Pa., 1896-1904; since then Rector of Emmanuel Church, Boston, and founder of the so-called Emmanuel Movement the motive of which is to bring into effective cooperation the physician and the psychologically trained clergyman with their special knowledge and aptitudes in recognizing the effects of mental states on physical states, and in an effort to improve the conditions of human life generally, a large part of the work being devoted to the sick. In conjunction with Dr. McComb he held health conferences every Wednesday evening besides giving much of his time during the week to interest those in need of moral and spiritual uplift. Author, Religious Opinions of John Locke; The Book of Genesis in the Light of Modern Knowledge; Religion and Medicine; The Living Word; The Christian Religion as a Healing Power; and Religion and Life.
Children of Elwood Worcester
2068 Constance Rullison, b Bethlehem, Pa., July 25, 1896. Bryn Marr, 1915-17; Radcliffe – Harvard, A.B., 1921. Army Nurse, then continued to run father’s rectory.
2069 Gurden Slatonstall Rulison, b Dec. 7, 1897.
2070 Blandina, b Geneva, NY, July 17, 1902; m Apr. 13, 1935, Carroll Harwood Brewster, b New Rochelle, NY, Aug. 15, 1888, d Mar. 26, 1952. Education: Radcliffe, A.B., 1923; Johns Hopkins Medical School, 1935. Pediatrician in New York City. Associate Professor of Clinical Pediatrics, New York University; Director of Pediatrics, New York Infirmary. Residence, New York City.
2071 David Rulison.
The Christian Religion As A Healing Power, A Defense and Exposition of the Emmanuel Movement, By Elwood Worchester and Samuel McComb, Emmanuel Church Boston, Moffat, Yard & Co., published Nov. 1909. Hardcover, 6 by 7, 130 pages. Blue cloth cover with gold lettering. Library copy with front sticker inside and minor inside pencil, no ink stamps or card holder were ever there. Contents: Criticism-True or False, The Growth Of The Work, Preparatory Studies, The Beginning Of The Movement, The Sphere of The Work, The Use Of Hypnosis, Our Relation To The Medical Profession, Raison D'etre of the Movement, The Minister and The Phsician, Results, A Vision Of The Future, Alleged Dangers, Every Minister a Physician of The Soul, The Emmanuel Movement and Christian Scienc Compared, about 15 more chapters
Psychology Usurping ChurchesAfter years of exposure to Wundtian psychology, Elwood Worcester became a leader in the “Religio-Psychiatric Movement” (later redefined as the “Religion and Health Movement”) which presumed to replace religious superstition with modern “science”; it strove to “make the ancient Christian message both credible and relevant....” A century of development shows that he planted seeds of religious destruction with his “progressive” ideas.
In 1904, Worcester accepted the position of Rector of the Emmanuel Church in Boston, Massachusetts. Within two years, a failure at social ministry, Worcester began the Emmanuel movement, a “modest experiment in the cure of souls based on the unity of body and soul.” [emphasis added] His declaration that the church had lost its control and influence over the lives of Americans was embraced by the media, with one journalist commenting: “... the church, taken as a whole, no longer leads or even deeply moves the American people.” Counselors led by prominent psychiatrists and psychologists “undertook to interfere in and change their patients’ attitudes and ways of life.”20 In reality, it represented the first public assault on traditional religious values and principles.
Powell, Robert C.
11 West College Dr. Ste B
Arlington Heights Il 60004-1900
(847) 441-8283
History of psychosomatic medicine. The Emmanuel movement. Helen Flanders Dunbar.Anton Boisen.
Scientific Psychotherapy and the Religious Psychologies
(1882-1920)
Between 1880 and 1920 American society witnessed an unprecedented era of psychological medicine in many ways rivaling interest in the mind-body problem today. Substantial evidence shows, for instance, that as early as the latter 1840s, there were doctors and dentists who, in addition to ether, chloroform, and nitrous oxide, also used hypnosis as an anesthetic. As early as the 1880s, psychotherapeutic techniques such as hypnosis, crystal gazing, and automatic writing had been adapted for medical use by some physicians from methods then in vogue among the spiritualists and mental healers. By the 1890s, certain neurologists, in addition to dispensing drugs and performing surgery, also practiced psychotherapy, depending on whether the patient’s malady was functional (that is, of psychological origin) or organic (based on some physical disease or lesion). Just after 1900, forward-looking institutions such as the Massachusetts General Hospital routinely used techniques of group psychotherapy in the treatment of tuberculosis patients. As early as 1905, certain forms of pastoral counseling were an integral part of mental nursing (what later became known as psychiatric social work).
Defining this late nineteenth century era of psychological medicine were events and personalities associated with the so-called Boston School of Psychotherapy, which began around 1880 and extended to 1920. This school, more a scientific attitude toward the mind-body problem than a physical place, centered around a number of youthful heirs to the intuitive psychology of character formation bequeathed to them by the Swedenborgians and transcendentalists. Among the new young turks were the Harvard philosopher-psychologist William James; Henry Pickering Bowditch, who was Dean of Harvard Medical School and a research physiologist; and Harvard’s first full professor of neurology, James Jackson Putnam. Each one in his own way was called upon to square the older literary psychology with the more rigorous scientific dictates of the age. They, in turn, spearheaded the Boston School, and drew into their circle such lights as Josiah Royce, Morton Prince, Edward Cowles, G. Stanley Hall, Richard Cabot, Joseph Hersey Pratt, Gertrude Stein, Mary Calkins, Ida Cannon, and more.
Perhaps the most significant development of the Boston School of Psychotherapy was the Emmanuel Movement, an unprecedented collaboration between religion and medicine that was launched in Boston in 1906 and soon reached international proportions. Its success was based on combining the scientific advances of dynamic psychotherapy with Christian teachings of moral character development. The movement began when Elwood Worcester, an Episcopal priest and head of the Emmanuel Church in Boston, with his assistant George Coombs, teamed up with the local physicians Richard Cabot, James Putnam, and Isador Coriat. The group gave a public presentation at the Emmanuel Church on religious ethics and the techniques of modern psychotherapy, and thereafter invited anyone with psychological problems to apply the next day for a free psychotherapeutic treatment. More than a hundred and twenty were waiting, and over the succeeding months the numbers grew.
Neighboring mainstream Boston churches soon began similar programs, as did many of the spiritualist and mental healing churches. Local colleges began collaborating in the training of ministers and physicians. Before long, the Emmanuel experiment had spread across the state and to churches throughout the nation. Eventually, churches began experimenting with the Emmanuel program in Europe and England.
A controversy soon developed in orthodox medical circles, however, over whether or not the ministers were practicing medicine without a license. Meanwhile local businessmen believed this was not orthodox Christianity, but more of what they called disreputable Christian Science. Richard Cabot and Elwood Worcester, by then the leading lights, quickly shut down the Emmanuel programs, but kept their own private practices alive until the 1920s. At that time they collaborated in launching the career of Anton Boisen. Boisen was a former mental patient and ordained minister who eventually became the founder of the clinical pastoral education movement, which is now a part of every divinity school program in the country.
In addition to Worcester and Cabot, one of the key figures of this period was William James. While he was a senior psychologist and philosopher at Harvard, his influence on the American visionary tradition was extensive and far exceeded merely his involvement in dynamic psychotherapy and theories of the subconscious. In the 1890s he had befriended Swami Vivekananda and promoted yoga and meditation. Later he inspired Helen Keller. He supported W.E.B. DuBois, founder of the NAACP, and Walter Lippman, the budding social critic. He taught Gertrude Stein the technique of automatic writing. His psychology of subconscious states profoundly moved Jung. His Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) fueled the psychology of religion movement and later played a role in the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous. His radical empiricism influenced Henri Bergson and impacted both German phenomenology and French existentialism.
Even the scientists said they got something from him. Percy Bridgman claimed that his theory of operationism was derived partly from James’ pragmatism. Niels Bohr borrowed from James for his principle of complementarity, showing that James even contributed to the new physics.
Beyond all these specific and personal influences, James set the theme for an age. He linked the older intuitive psychology of character formation propounded by the transcendentalists with the new experimental science by demanding that modern psychology be much more than a discipline obsessed with measurement. In addition to normal thought and feeling, he admitted the reality of hallucinations, dreams and visions, religious ecstasy, paranormal experiences, near-death phenomena, and more, into the realm of a legitimate scientific psychology. In his eyes psychology should become a person-centered science. By this he meant that science might refuse to deal with any phenomenon that is outside the range of human experience, but it may not refuse on purely philosophical grounds to deal with that which is, in fact, within the range of human experience. Thus, by the end of his career, James presciently advised psychologists to study the fall of the threshold of consciousness; he maintained that psychology’s true contribution to the religious sphere lay in developing a cross-cultural comparison of subconscious states; and he variously forecast that depth psychology, psychical research, and meditation would become the psychology of the future.
The Psychoanalytic Underground
(1933-1964)
The American visionary tradition at the opening of the twentieth century expanded in many directions with the onset of modernism. Between World War I and the 1950s, academic psychology was controlled by the experimentalist mindset, which produced mental measurements and behavioristic learning theory, while psychiatry became increasingly more biological. Meanwhile, a host of European influences, from Freud to Marx and existentialism, flooded the popular landscape. Ascona, a popular retreat for socialist radicals and free thinkers, flourished in Switzerland. On the Left Bank in Paris, in the 1930s, American expatriates read poetry, wrote novels, and learned from the Sufi teachings of Gurdjieff. American popular psychology reveled in the exploits of Harry Houdini, the charismatic writing of the blind-deaf Helen Keller, and later the trance utterances of Arthur Ford and Edgar Cayce. The Reverend Frank Buchman launched the Oxford group, which became Moral Rearmament. Doctor Bob and Bill W. founded Alcoholics Anonymous. Harry Emerson Fosdick and Emmett Fox propounded a new message for popular Christianity. Dale Carnegie produced his How to Win Friends and Influence People. Vedanta, the Self-Realization Fellowship, zen as interpreted by D. T. Suzuki, and the meaning of truth and beauty according to Krishnamurti all began to flourish.
But the main avenue by which educated intellectuals were permitted entry into the unconscious as a socially sanctioned behavior, from the 1920s to the 1960s, was psychoanalysis. This was somewhat paradoxical because when Freud came to speak at Clark University in 1909, he decried as unscientific the very religious psychotherapies that first took up his ideas. All culture, for Freud, was the sublimation of forbidden sexual impulses into socially acceptable channels. Art was the expression of neurosis, religion an illusion of the masses. Only through controlled scientific analysis of one’s free associations, he maintained, could unconscious repressions be discovered and neurotic symptoms lifted.
His ideas caught the imagination of a generation of New York intellectuals in the 1920s, and thus began to influence American social thought. But the real era of psychoanalysis began in the 1930s, when eminent Jewish analysts from Vienna and Berlin who had trained under Freud were forced to flee the rise of Nazism. Many found distinguished posts at American universities and medical schools. Analytic institutes were founded in the United States, and later generations of young physicians became staunch Freudians.
Freudian theory, meanwhile, although it never influenced the core of experimental laboratory psychophysics in psychology, or biological advances in experimental psychiatry, had penetrated into art, literature, sociology, theology, and the clinical practice of psychotherapy. Psychoanalysis then became integrated into medical psychology during World War II and began to dominate clinical psychology within the Veterans’ Administration. Thereafter it ceased being merely a popular movement of the avant garde and entered the American mainstream.
But psychoanalysis also had its own shadow culture. Numerous dissenters to Freud, such as Harry Stack Sullivan, Erich Fromm, and Karen Horney, modified Freud’s theories to fit the American psyche. Foremost among these dissenters were two problematic figures: Wilhelm Reich and Carl Jung. Reich propounded a sexual theory of orgone energy in many ways more radical than Freud’s. His sexual politics so enraged the status quo that he was eventually imprisoned, and died in 1957 in a mental institution for the criminally insane.
Jung, meanwhile, had established himself in America long before Freud. His presence was due largely to the pre-psychoanalytic influence in Boston of Swiss psychiatrists such as August Forel, Adolf Meyer, August Hoch, and Paul DuBois. Jung became pre-eminent on the American scene from 1904 because of his word association studies and his theory of unconscious complexes, which he used as much in service of biological psychiatry as Freudian analysis. Jung, in fact, represented the earlier psychology of William James, Theodore Flournoy and F.W.H. Myers, and not psychoanalysis. He remained somewhat bitter to the end of his life because history had cast him so totally in the shadow of Freud. In reality, he was the only twentieth century psychologist of the older dissociation school to take up the methods of unconscious symbolism. Rightly, however, his theories continue to have vitality among the various counter-culture psychotherapies of transcendence, long after psychoanalysis has ceased to be a moving influence in that domain.
Pre-AA Understanding of Alcoholism
New Thought and the Emmanuel Movement
Group treatment of alcoholism in the early twentieth century can be traced to New Thought, a religious and philosophical movement in the second half of the nineteenth century which focused on mind and spirit, and the Emmanuel Movement, a Protestant church sponsored, pre-Freudian psychotherapeutic system established in 1906 by Rev. Elwood Worcester. Relaxation therapy and autosuggestion were used to reach the unconscious. New Thought taught that sickness was the result of failure to recognize the Christian God as sole reality and that 'right thinking' had a healing effect. The Emmanuel Movement claimed that all diseases including alcoholism had physical, mental and spiritual components and that prayer, group support and self-help were important to recovery.
Rev. Worcester's Emmanuel Movement first focused on treatment of tuberculosis in Boston's slums. Later, treatment included a variety of 'mental disorders', including alcoholism. Treatment redirected the attention of patients away from their problems to a life of service and spirituality. Courtenay Baylor, a patient of the Emmanuel Movement, eventually became influential in the group treatment of alcoholism. Richard R. Peabody, author of The Common Sense of Drinking, was a patient of Baylor who further refined the treatment method emphasizing control of the patient's feelings. Patients were prescribed detailed schedules. Worcester, Baylor and Peabody were not physicians. Success of their treatment methods is unclear. The Emmanuel Movement and other integrations of spirituality and psychotherapy influenced the eventual development of the spirituality-based principles of the 12-steps approach to addiction recovery by Alcoholics Anonymous (AA).
In the 1930s public opinion saw alcoholism as a moral failing. Those without financial resources could find help only through state hospitals, the Salvation Army, and other charitable and religious groups. Those who could afford psychiatrists or hospitals were often treated with barbiturates and belladonna known as purge and puke.[3] A little known book by Richard Peabody titled The Common Sense of Drinking first proffered the alcoholic could train his mind so that he would no longer want to drink. (It was this book where the phrase halfway measures are of no avail originally appeared. Bill Wilson borrowed from it heavily in composing Alcoholics Anonymous.)
One contemporary doctor who had great influence on AA was William Duncan Silkworth, M.D., a specialist in treating alcoholics. He contended that alcoholism was a disease that consisted of an obsession and an allergy. The obsession was the desire to start drinking, and the allergy (in the general sense, an adverse reaction, not an immunoglobularly mediated acute hypersensitivity) was the compulsion to continue once the first drink had been taken. In Silkworth's view, alcoholics were caught by the delusion that despite often severe consequences of the last drinking episode, no harm will be done by the next drink. Silkworth believed that the two primary protectors of health; reason and will, were of no use against this disease.[4]
Worcester, Elwood
(May 16, 1862-July 19, 1940). Founder of the Emmanuel Movement. He was born in Massillon, Ohio, and grew up in Rochester, New York. Worcester graduated from Columbia College in 1887 and then studied at General Theological Seminary. From 1888 until 1890 he was superintendent of the Sunday School at St. Ann's, Brooklyn. He was ordained deacon on Feb. 6, 1890, and priest on May 23, 1891. Worcester also studied at the University of Leipzig, where he focused on experimental psychology and psychosomatic relationships. He received his Ph.D. from Leipzig in 1889. From 1890 until 1896 he was chaplain and professor of philosophy, psychology, and Christian evidences at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. In 1896 he became the rector of St. Stephen's Church, Philadelphia. From 1904 until his retirement in 1929 he was the rector of Emmanuel Church, Boston. While at Emmanuel he sought to combine Christianity and medicine in ministry. This healing ministry became known as the Emmanuel Movement. It was noted for the Christian application of psychotherapy to nervous disorders and was one of the major healing ministries in the history of the Episcopal Church. Among his numerous publications were Religion and Medicine (1908), and The Christian Religion as a Healing Power (1909). Worcester died in Kennebunkport, Maine. See Emmanuel Movement.