Relativism and Subjectivism
Modern life is fraught with relativism and subjectivism on all levels and this has caused serious problems for psychology. Since the human intellect is designed to come to knowledge of things by means of the senses, the human faculties are essentially oriented outwards. Subjectivism causes psychological damage because it trains the various faculties to act contrary to their nature, i.e. it orders them towards the self rather than towards those things which are outside of man. Subjectivism does not lead to happiness since happiness for man is eudaemonistic rather than solipsistic. Psychological counseling techniques which do not provide a proper direction to the directee but which only listen to him 'without prejudice' contribute to the directee's unhappiness. Regardless of what the directee wants, the psychologist is not merely a pacifier, only listening to the directee so that he may feel better by getting things off his chest, so to speak. Also, those who argue that one should not be judgmental as a psychologist are irrational. The entire counseling endeavor is ordered toward judging the state of the faculties in order to arrive at a means to counter the disorder of the faculties. While subjectivism may be appetitively appeasing (principally to those whose appetites are not rightly ordered), it has no capacity to produce mental health.
Relativism holds that truth is relative and it directly militates against the good of the intellect. Since the intellect is ordered toward the truth, which is the conformity of the intellect and thing, the intellect either conforms or it does not. Since the principle of excluded middle applies to whether one conforms or not, all truth is absolute, because it conforms to the thing. If the intellect does not conform to the thing, one does not have the truth. If one has part of the truth, one still does not have the truth as such, since truth conforms not by degree, but as the thing is. Hence, relativism militates against mental health by weakening the intellect. The intellect is weakened because the person does not seek to conform himself to reality but seeks to judge everything in terms of self or some other invalid criteria.
Relativism and subjectivism affect the possible intellect by developing habits in the possible intellect which incline the judgment of reason away from things as they are, Since truth is the good of the intellect, relativism and subjectivism militate against mental health. They disorder the will since the will is ordered toward the good in general, not the apparent good. But in the case of relativism and subjectivism, the intellect does not discern between apparent and real goods and therefore the will which is moved by the possible intellect does not choose based upon the truth. Subjectivism and relativism actually reduce the voluntariness of the action of the will since the will needs knowledge (truth) presented by the possible intellect in order to be able truly to choose.
The cogitative power becomes disordered by the reformulations of the possible intellect and will according to false judgments of the possible intellect regarding the truth, since relativism and subjectivism have disordered this judgment. These images get stored in memory which affect later deliberations. Moreover, the passions become vicious because they are moved by what the individual wants rather than by what is truly good for him. The final trajectory of subjectivism and relativism is away from the truth in which man's moral, spiritual and psychological good consists. The trajectory is toward vice, sin, ignorance (since he does not know the truth), mental illness and ultimately unhappiness, since happiness is something had in accord with virtue. Therefore, psychology must abandon all relativism or subjectivsism, both in its theory and in its practice.
Fr. Chad Ripperger, Introduction to the Science of Mental Health, Denton, NE: Sensus Traditionis, 2007, 694-695.
