Freshmen Hear Talk On Relation Between Psychiatrists, Clerics

"Religionists are looking to help people find peace of mind, just as psychiatrists are," Dr. Preston K. Munter, psychiatrist to the University Health Services, told an audience of five persons in Grays Hall common room last night.

The fact that the cleric and the psychiatrist use different techniques should not obscure the fact that they both have the same goals, Munter went on to explain. The talk, entitled "Psychiatry and Religion," was one of several that have been presented as part of the program to use the new freshman dormitory units to promote more informal intellectual activity in the freshman year.

Psychiatrist Rejects Revelation

He qualified this statement somewhat, however, by admitting that, while a clergyman would probably consider an intense religious experience as being the result of divine revelation, the psychiatrist would be more inclined to regard it as caused by emotional influences.

"Although the clergyman doesn't set out to cure and the psychiatrist doesn't set out to save, they both want to help the individual to make a better adaptation to himself and his environment," he went on.

Munter admitted, however, that the classical Freudian doctrine pictured religion as a neurosis.

The principal difference between the psychiatrist and the clergyman, he added, is that the former deals not in his own standard of values, but in the values of the subject. The clergyman, on the other hand, is prepared to tell the subject what his goals should be.

Munter also discussed the work of the psychiatric division of the University Health Services, at which point one freshman ended the discussion by asking ominously, "If about 500 freshmen walked in with anxiety and depression and all that and you found out that the root of their trouble was having to wear coats and ties in the Union...."