{121}
There was something wise and wonderful about how Swiss psychotherapist Paul Tournier burst on the American scene in the mid-1950s.
First he wrote A Doctor's Casebook in the Light of the Bible, which, to tell the truth, didn't "burst" on anyone's "scene," but it alerted the reading public to Tournier's presence. It was a warm and thoughtful book by a physician of profound faith who believed that a person's physical and emotional health was rooted in a wholesome spiritual life. The depth and spiritual insight made you wanl to read the book a second or a third time.
Then came The Meaning of Persons. Other books followed, but this one established Tournier as an expert and a communicator. He not only successfully integrated psychology and Christianity but told about it in such a disarming way that you felt included—not as a patient in his office, but as his friend.
Born in Geneva, Switzerland, the son of a pastor, Tournier spent his adult life (except for an army stint) as a general practitioner in private practice in Geneva. In 1932, through the Oxford movement, he gained a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, and that changed his whole perspective on psychology as well. More and more he moved into psychotherapy, realizing the need to treat his patients as whole human beings. He saw that illness could have emotional and spiritual as well as physical origins, and vice versa.
Though his professional colleagues were slow to acknowledge his approach, he gradually attained an international standing. He describes his approach briefly in a later book The Person Reborn: "Technology and faith work together. Psychoanalysis explores the problems in order to bring them out into the daylight, grace dissolves them." The authentic person can be
relieved, reached, and helped ״only through living dialogue between man and man, and man and God."
What is remarkable about Tournier is the very natural way in which he brings in the spiritual dimension and the need for a relationship with God through Jesus Christ. ״The true view of man and his life is only to be found in the biblical perspective." He communicates penetrating issues in a warm, unthreatening manner.
In The Meaning of Persons Tournier tells about the challenge of his work. People see me, tell me stories about themselves, correct them in subsequent visits, all in order that I can understand them, he says. But each patient "remains an impenetrable mystery." How can we discover the true person? He quotes Pascal: . , "We strive continually to adorn and preserve our imaginary self,
* neglecting the true one." We are a mixture of opposites.
Tournier finds a powerful analogy in Adam and Eve after the fall, sewing fig leaves together to cover themselves. "But God himself soon came. . . . Instead of taking man's clothing away from him, God provides him with a finer garment." Then he cites the apostle Paul's injunction to put on the new man, born of the Spirit (Col. 3:9 -10).
Central to Tournier's book is the distinction between the person (our true self) and the personage (what we reveal). We make efforts to isolate our person completely from our personage, but Tournier urges us to accept the "clothing" that God himself gives us־—"the personage God wills us to have."
In another analogy, Tournier says each human being is like an orchestra with an internal conductor. "A margin of fluctuation is a characteristic of life," and the conductor motions to that instrument to tone down or speed up. In our lives, such fluctuations may bring us to a counselor's office, but fluctuations in themselves are healthy. They make our lives in teresting.
Psychological counseling is a fairly new field, and Christians have climbed aboard only in the last few decades. Nowadays we see several different versions of Christian counseling and a slew of self-help books that address psychological issues. Paul Tournier is the father of them all, a pioneer in the field, an expert who brought his Christian faith into every aspect of his work.