

It is the 40th anniversary since Catholic psychiatrist Conrad Baars (1919-1981) joined with Anna Terruwe to release the book The Role of the Church in the Causation, Treatment and Prevention of the Crisis in the Priesthood. A synthesis of ideas which they had presented to the 1970 Synod of Catholic Bishops, the book described what is today termed emotional deprivation disorder and warned that priests and religious with emotional repression and love deprivation could lead to disaster in the Church. Champions of Baars’ beliefs included Pope Paul VI.
The psychiatrist’s daughter, Sue Baars, is a therapist at In His Image Christian Counseling Service in Irving, Texas, and continues to keep his legacy alive. She spoke with the Register about her father and his work.
Your father had the chance to see the ugliness human nature is capable of when he was a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II.
He was born and raised in Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, and lived there until 1946. In 1942, while he was in medical school, the Nazis invaded and occupied the country. He was scheduled to be sent to Germany to a work camp, but escaped. He spent some time working with the Dutch and French underground, helping American and English airmen who had been shot down return to England.
In 1943, the Gestapo was hot on his trail, so he attempted an escape to Spain. While trying to cross the Pyrenees Mountains, he was captured. He was sent to Buchenwald, one of the worst concentration camps. He was there for a year and a half, until near the end of the war. He wrote a memoir of his time there, which my mother and I published as an autobiography after my father died. We called it Doctor of the Heart.
What were some of the experiences he shared?
When you read the story, you really see the hand of God in his life. God wanted him to survive to bring a particular type of psychology based on Thomas Aquinas’ understanding of the human psyche to the English-speaking world.
When he first arrived at the camp, a fellow prisoner told him to tell the guards he was a doctor. When he objected, as he was only a medical student, the man warned that if he didn’t, he’d be sent to work making explosives in an underground factory. Everyone who went there died, the man said. So my father did and was able to work in the infirmary, enjoy better treatment and survive.
One of his great consolations came from a French priest, who secretly gave him holy Communion and heard his confession. My father, in turn, would give Communion secretly to Catholic patients. It was a great blessing. It really kept him going.
The Church was always important to my father. He was always faithful about attending Mass, saying the Rosary and even praying the Divine Office. He was a saintly man.
Besides the faith, the emotion of anger towards the Nazis kept him going, as well as his hope for eventual release. My father watched other prisoners die, not because they were seriously ill, but because they lost hope.
And your father saw many people murdered.
Yes. He relates how a certain hierarchy developed among the prisoners. The guards allowed the communists, despite being prisoners themselves, to take over some aspects of running the prison. They would murder those who they thought were a threat to their authority or who might diminish their food rations or because they were of a different ethnic group or because they didn’t like them for some other reason.
How did the experience affect him?
He lost teeth due to malnutrition. He suffered from edema. He died at age 62; it’s common that people who survived the camps didn’t reach their full life expectancy.
While many survivors were bitter, he was not. In fact, he was a happy person. But he wanted people never to forget of what human beings are capable. He believed human life was sacred. He, for example, was committed to the pro-life movement.
He also spoke out against contraception.
Yes. He believed what the Church taught, that it was morally wrong. He also saw that it fostered selfishness and hindered people from loving unconditionally. When you can have what you want anytime you want it, you begin to look at another person as an object and fail to love that person. Pope John Paul II discusses this in his theology of the body. My father believed contraception created a more self-centered way of living. We can see that in society.
When he first came to the United States, your father thought about leaving psychiatry.
After practicing in a state hospital system for 10 years, he began to believe he couldn’t help anyone. He was discouraged and thought about doing something else.
At the suggestion of his cousin, who was a Benedictine monk, he read the works of Anna Terruwe. He came to see problems with the prevailing methods of psychology, which included psychoanalysis. Freud said that moral formation of conscience caused repression, which no good Catholic can accept. If that were true, the solution would be to get rid of our consciences. We can’t do that.
Dr. Terruwe mentored him and then they became colleagues. They co-authored books and made a huge impact on the English-speaking world.
What is emotional deprivation disorder?
It is the deprivation of the innate human need to be loved for oneself. It is a frustration or a lack of fulfillment of a natural process. People grow physically, intellectually and spiritually, but emotionally their growth does not keep pace. They are an “unaffirmed person.”
Symptoms include a difficulty in relating emotionally with other adults, whether through friendships and other relationships or in marriage. These people have not been given that gift of themselves through being affirmed through being loved. They have a hard time going out of themselves. They expect other people to relate to them first. It interferes with peace and love in relationships.
People with the disorder may have feelings of inferiority, inadequacy, insecurity and uncertainty. They have difficulty making decisions, especially in things involving feelings. They can be brilliant and accomplished academically or professionally, but emotionally they’re immature.
Affirmation is the antidote to this frustration. It’s not something we do; we learn how to be present to that person. It’s a three-step process:
1) You take the time to be aware of, present to, open to and interiorly receptive to another person.
2) You allow your feelings interiorly to be moved by that person. Therapists are often not oriented towards being present to a person, but to helping or fixing a problem. That has a place in therapy, but for those who have not experienced being loved unconditionally, it’s important to just be present.
3) As you’re moved, you allow them to see that your feelings for them have been moved. A therapist does this professionally so that boundaries are not crossed. These people have to understand that their goodness has been able to move another person with love or liking or joy. Another person has to be able to see that goodness and reflect it back to them.
It’s compatible with Christian charity: loving our neighbor.
Yes. In our society, people are always in a hurry. They need to take the time to be with other people and experience the gift of other people. And a person who has not been affirmed or adequately loved feels this acutely. They feel isolated. The right therapy can be important in their healing.
This lack of affirmation has affected the priesthood and is discussed in your father’s Crisis in the Priesthood book.
When my father and Dr. Terruwe addressed the Synod of Catholic Bishops, they were sharing their experience working with clergy. They discovered that some men admitted to the priesthood were not emotionally mature men; they were not affirmed. It had a negative impact on their priesthood, relationships with their congregations and individuals.
They recommended that when a man was being considered for the seminary that he not just receive psychological testing, but that time be taken to get to know him personally. His warmth and personality is going to have a positive impact on his priesthood and the Church. It can bring people towards God, just as a negative personality is going to turn them away.
While emotional problems contributed to the scandals in the priesthood, I’m pleased to see that much greater attention is being paid now to who is healthy enough to be ordained a priest. There’s a better understanding that there needs to be a human formation as well as a spiritual formation. We’re doing a better job evaluating candidates for the priesthood, and it’s going to be better for the Church as a whole.
Jim Graves writes from Newport Beach, California.
I was glad to find this interview with Sue Baars whose father’s books have brought such healing to my life and others’ lives. Such important work! I’m afraid the reader who criticized Baars’ work has no idea what it is about—we should not criticize what we do not understand, which in this case, is the work itself and the people who have been healed through it. It is not at odds with a Christ-centered healing, quite the contrary, and we are expected to help/love each other when and where we can (love one another!) which Conrad Baars, and now Sue Baars, have done. Read Conrad Baars books, then you will understand that it has nothing to do with blaming others or having a pity party.
Invaluable resource. A very close friend gave me Born Only Once and it spoke to me deeply. The latest compilation, (I will give them a new heart) also gives deep insight not just to those in the priesthood, but those of us affected by the priesthood. There is a reference to and essay he wrote in 1965 that I have been looking for, if anyone finds it, please post…it is entitled “Periodic Abstinence-An expression of marital love”
@Damon, not everyone experiences all the familial things you mention. Looking at the cross means to “understand” the price Christ paid for your life and that you ARE of value —-at least to Him (if no other). Why would Jesus lay His own life down if you had no worth? When you are finally able comprehend your value in Christ it is He who will set you on a path to overcoming and dealing with all obstacles in life. Blaming others, blaming parents or having a pity party is not conducive to Christian maturity and spiritual growth in Christ Jesus.
@In the pew,
Look at the cross? I trust you don’t really intend to reduce all human formation, development, and perfection to the act of looking at the cross! That beautiful devotion requires and presumes we have reached a certain threshold of personal maturity. Grace builds on nature. That threshold is normatively reached in the family: a mother, father, and siblings over decades in loving interpersonal community. Here from the first moment of our existence WITHIN our mother, to that first touch, kiss, smile, embrace, comfort, soothe, encouragement, laugh, cuddle…do we come to know who we are as a being worthy of love, then capable of love. This is being affirmed in the truth of our being as persons in the image and likeness of God.
As humans, our only approach to the universe is a human approach. So, what would you call a human approach to everything DEPENDENT on the Lord? I’d call it a life of faith.
Baars/Terruwe rescued modern therapy from the humanism you rightly condemn. It is not possible to separate true affirmation from God, since the whole purpose is to affirm our being as from, for, and to God!
@Damon, Humanism takes a human approach to everything independent of the Lord. It’s the belief that man has the ability to solve all my personal and worldly issues. You wrote [How can one love if one has not been loved: You cannot give what you have not received. You cannot affirm yourself.] Damon, by your statement you have missed the entire point of Christianity. If you don’t feel loved, if you don’t feel valued and need affirmation,—then you haven’t looked at the cross recently. The cross of Jesus Christ on Calvary should tell you all you ever need to know about how much you are loved. No Psychiatrist, Psychologist, Counselor, Ten Step Program or medication will substitute for a right understanding of how much you are affirmed by Christ.
In the pew,
Don’t want to assume that I fully understand your use of the word “humanism”, but Baars/Terruwe’s “affirmation” work is most assuredly “human”. The popular hijacking of affirmation since the ‘70’s deliberately gutted true affirmation of its divine roots. Baars/Terruwe give flesh and bones to Christ’s command to “love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.”
How can one love if one has not been loved: You cannot give what you have not received. You cannot affirm yourself.
Affirmation in this true sense is nothing more than become fully human as persons made in the image and likeness of God. We can only come to know ourselves in relationships of love with others. Not in solitude - even in solitude with God. We, in the image and likeness of the Trinitarian God, are made for loving personal communion - imperfectly here and now, then perfectly within God for eternity.
Baars/Terruwe show us what happens when that formative affirmation is lacking or withheld: arrested development with devastating forms of illness, disease, and depravity.
Seems to me all the time, money, counseling and drugs invested by modern man in the pursuit of addressing or curing psychological and psychiatric disorders amount to nothing more than humanism. If one is a believer in Christ and yet still has a need for “affirmation,” it is very likely this person has never fully submitted himself/herself before the cross. One will never experience true peace in this earthly life without first yielding obedience to the sovereignty of the Lord in all things.
Enlightening, even for the lay person! Your publication is a great source for quality information. Thanks.
Thank you, Sue Baars for reminding us of your Father. Altho a lay person, the book was recommended by Fr. Francis MacNutt,OP and I feel I personally gained much from it. I also heard your Father speak once but cannot remember the place, (it could have been A.C.T.) and I was spell-bound. It was with a great sadness when I heard of his passing. He contributed so much and is sorely missed.
The book was “Healing the Unaffirmed”. Janice Brown
“Affirmation and Psychic Incarnation” healing CDs were the best $40 I ever spent on my emotional well being.
Lone Thinker,
Good post! I will be studying Dr. Baars after this article. As a psychologist, it is gratifying to read about a mental health professional and their link to faiht (rather rare). You are spot on in your commentary related to the “fallout” of the sexual revolution (attitudes, contraception, abortion, etc). I can verify that I have yet (in 26 years) have to work with a patient that is pleased with how these social changes “enriched” their lives. Instead, virtually all (young and old alike) are filled with regret, remorse and anger over the innocence that that they parlayed, or the the children aborted in their youth. All this with the blessings of organizations like the APA.
Very strong man emotionally and spiritually, a saint I would suggest. The emphasis on maturity for priesthood can be fleshed out for every human being and every profession. Sexual activity in marriage or the lack thereof are not the recipe for fulfilled humans. The rate of divorce, co-habitation, the high incidence of abuse of minors and adults by married, single, male and female is an unknown quantity. See the State/public schools in your own nation, which the media cannot compute as they have no central reporting system, and are not Catholic clerics! The insights by Dr Baars, into the harm done by contraception decades before abortion becam a “right” and abortifacient pills were invented makes that finding more valid. Paul V1 is villified but Mother Nature is on his side. Sad but true. May this article get the respectful acceptance it deserves. Thank you for it.
I have been a tremendous admirer of Dr. Baars since reading “Healing the Unaffirmed”. What a treasure he and Dr. Terruwe have left us as a legacy. I recommend their work at every opportunity - personally and professionally. Thank you, Sue Baars for continuing such important work.
Excellent post. This is a fresh way, for me, of thinking about vocations and formation.
Thank you for this inspiring reminder that we will be getting a new league of good priests. We must continue to keep priests in our daily prayers and this article allowed me to see another layer of human in them.
Jim, this is beautiful. This was a great man whose wisdom and compassion continue to speak if we will but listen.
@MichaelBarger1