In reality, it is relatively obvious, but it never hurts to make the comment: psychologists, especially clinicians, are a replacement functional of the priests:
1) In regard to the care of ‘mental’ do virtually the same thing: they Are obligated professionally to remain silent in the face of what one tells them, they are required professionally to listen: In other words, empathic listening, and offer a solution. We must recognize that the version for priests it was better (it was free, recognized without problem the issue of guilt and gave solutions -well, absolvían the sins, that is a lot more than any psychologist can do that). And both versions are inferior to the relationship that is replaced -that of friendship.
2) Determine good and evil. Of the priests that is obvious, let’s look at what the psychologists: In a society as secularized as ours, the only thing we have left is the ‘normal’ (and psychologists tell us when we are normal and tell us how to return to it). Well, in reality the psychologists offer another ideal: that of the person without trauma, without anguish or guilt (and the psychologists tell us everything we do wrong and cause us anguish and guilt). Like the priests, living to discover problems: sins before you, any mental problem at present, which are continuously being discovered, new, are more common. Let’s say, that there are no major producers of distress that psychologists: To continuously raise how terrible the anguish to only reproduce, nothing more distressing and traumatic than the never-ending search, with hazard to the left and right of the life without anguish or trauma. In that, I have to say also, priests had the advantage-their good and their bad were more satisfactory than the evil and the good of the psychologists.
But, if the priests no longer can fulfil its old functions (because, even among believers, it is becoming less credible that you can have a good life, following the advice of the religion), then they have to be replaced. The important thing would be to discover they replaced the sociologists. I do not think that the prophets, although that would indicate that psychologists are, in terms of versions refurbished old functions, much better. On second thought, it seems relatively reasonable.