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Some books are like doors; you open them and voila!—you enter a new world. Other books are door openers. They open the passage so that others may go through.
Clyde M. Narramore, in The Psychology of Counseling, was a π 291 door opener. In the latter decades of the twentieth century, books by counselor/psychologists Dobson, Smalley, Harley,׳ Chapman, Wright, and others made regular appearances on Christian best-seller lists. Who opened the door for them?
By the year 2000, thousands of churches across America were employing psychological counselors, trained in marriage and family therapy. Who opened the door?
Today many evangelical seminaries are training pastors as well as psychological specialists in counseling for ministry in the churches of North America. Who opened the door?
The answer, of course, is Clyde Narramore. It's obvious that The Psychology of Counseling met a need, because it went through twenty printings within fifteen years of publication.
In the first half of the century, conservative Christians had lots of questions about psychology and psychiatry. To them it smacked of Freud and sex and pseudoscience. Yet pastors were finding that parishioners often came to them with problems they were not trained to answer. More and more of their time was spent in counseling and they were at a loss to know how to cope with the load.
With a doctorate from Columbia University and working as consulting psychologist on the staff of the Los Angeles County Superintendent of Schools, Narramore was a professional in the field. He had written some smaller books for Christian parents, such as How to Tell Your Children about Sex and How to Understand and Influence Your Children. His expertise was in the area of child psychology. But as pastors sought him out for help, he
felt he had to do more. So he wrote The Psychology of Counseling, with the long subtitle Professional Techniques for Pastors, Teachers, Youth L eaders and All Who Are Engaged in the Incomparable Art of Counseling.
After an introductory section on how a minister should go about it ("Basic Concepts and Techniques of Counseling"), Nar-ramore delves into specific areas of counseling with such chapters as "Counseling with Teenagers" (his specialty), "The Mentally and Emotionally 111," "Basic Guides in Marriage Counseling," and "Problems of Sex." His final section, "The Use of Scripture in Counseling," is a valuable forty-page appendix.
Professionals criticized the book because of its too-pat answers to some complex problems and his heavy use of Scripture. Yet Narramore was not afraid to tackle subjects that might have daunted others—such as homosexuality.
Clyde Narramore was not the first Christian to write in this field. Wayne Oates and Seward Hiltner had written earlier for their specialized audiences, as had Ernest White in England with his excellent Christian Life and the Unconscious, but no one did as much in the area as Clyde Narramore.
He began a daily broadcast called Psychology for Living, which aired on nearly two hundred stations across the country; he started counseling centers in the East, Southwest, and West Coast; he launched Psychology for Living magazine; and then he founded a professional school, the Rosemead School, to train men and women for a ministry in counseling. Rosemead continues today as a branch of Biola University.
With all these efforts, Narramore brought psychological issues into Christian discussions. In a way, he gave evangelicals permission to consult modern psychology and psychiatry alongside Ihe Bible for the answers to their problems. And he showed a way to integrate Christian belief with this professional field. Today we see the widespread results of Narramore's groundbreaking work.
Yes, it was quite a big door that Clyde Narramore opened.