Henri Nouwen and The Return of the Prodigal Son. Gabrielle Earnshaw
of Freud and others,45 was moving into a position of nuanced support. In 1953, Pope Pius XII addressed participants of the International Congress of Psychotherapy with these encouraging words: “Be assured that the Church follows your research and your medical practice with her warm interest and her best wishes. You labor in a terrain that is very difficult.”46 Nouwen was in the vanguard of newly ordained priests choosing to study psychology rather than the more traditional disciplines of theology, classics, and languages. Under the influence of Berger and other leading Dutch thinkers such as Han Fortmann,47 Nouwen chose Boisen as the subject for his doctoral thesis.
Nouwen would continue his work on Boisen when he moved to the United States to study in the program of theology and psychiatric theory at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas, from 1964 to 1965.
After completing the program at Menninger, Boisen would also be the subject of a second doctoral thesis for an advanced theology degree at the University of Nijmegen.
When Nouwen joined the psychology department at the University of Notre Dame in 1964, his first academic appointment, Boisen was the subject of many lectures and was mandatory reading for students in his classes. Later, at Yale Divinity School, Nouwen’s 1972 course on pastoral care also drew heavily from his work on Boisen. Boisen was, in fact, the subject of Nouwen’s first book, one that he never completed, and of which no excerpts have ever been published. But, interestingly, Nouwen would not refer directly again to Boisen, the subject of so much of his attention for two decades, after 1977.48
In spite of Boisen’s disappearance from Nouwen’s life and work, evidence that he was a major influence can be found in the Nouwen Archives, where one finds shelves of material on Boisen. Over the course of his decade-long research and study, Nouwen visited the Topeka State Archives in the Kansas Historical Society to consult Boisen’s papers and had all of Boisen’s case histories mimeographed.49 Included in this trove are fifty articles either on or by Boisen, many heavily annotated in Nouwen’s hand.
The Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) movement, founded by Boisen, began in the United States in the 1920s to educate ministers and chaplains for work in hospitals, psychiatric facilities, and other clinical settings. For adapting the clinical case study method that was introduced by Richard Cabot to the training of chaplains, Boisen is considered a pioneer of the case study method for pastoral care work. He developed a detailed methodology that was used in the process of gathering information about a person. Students using the assessment tool learned how to reflect systematically about the human condition, both psychologically and theologically.
A central tenet of Boisen’s thought was that a person is a “living human document” on which experiences of life are written.50 He taught that the same authority given to text should be given to the language used by those in mental struggles. In a speech to clinicians in 1950, he put it this way: “We are not trying to introduce anything new into theological curriculum beyond a new approach to some ancient problems. We are trying rather to call attention to the central task of the Church, that of saving souls, and to the central problem of theology—that of sin and salvation. What is new is the attempt to begin with the study of living human documents rather than books, and to focus attention upon those who are grappling with the issues of spiritual life and death.”51
Boisen was born in 1876 in Bloomington, Indiana, to German immigrant parents. He graduated from Indiana University in 1897. Influenced by his father’s passion for languages and nature, he taught French for two years in a Bloomington high school before earning a master’s degree in forestry from Yale University in 1905. For three years he was a forest assistant for the US Department of Agriculture.
He started charting his own course at age thirty-five, enrolling in Union Seminary in New York City, where he was ordained a Presbyterian minister in 1911. Under the tutelage of Dr. George Albert Coe, Boisen began developing a view of the psychology of religion grounded in both religion and the study of human behavior. Boisen then served as both a Presbyterian and a Congregationalist pastor, was chaplain at the Iowa State University campus, and during World War I served with the YMCA in France. Like Nouwen, who also broadened his work experience by spending his postordination years in various religious settings, Boisen spent some time researching rural pastorates in Kansas and Maine as a sociological investigator for the Presbyterian Home Board of Missions.52
But none of this is the work he is remembered for today. In his late thirties, Boisen suffered a severe psychotic episode and required care in a mental hospital for catatonic schizophrenia. He suffered extreme bouts of psychosis for the rest of his life and was hospitalized in psychiatric facilities on numerous occasions. Using his own illness as a basis for understanding and expertise, he wrote much of his best work. Boisen would become the first chaplain at a mental hospital in 1924. He first worked briefly with the Boston Psychiatric Hospital, and then, with the help of Cabot, moved to the Worcester State Hospital in Massachusetts, and later to the Elgin State Hospital in Illinois. He eventually became a teacher, establishing the first program in clinical pastoral training in the United States, and helped found the Chicago Council for Clinical Training.
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