Anton Boisen: Madness, Mysticism, and the Origins of Clinical Pastoral Education seeks to recement a place for Boisen in the history of clinical pastoral education in the United States. Sean J. LaBat begins with the assertion that “Boisen died a forgotten man” (1). But, though the clergyman is far from a household name, scholars and practitioners have continued to acknowledge Boisen's work with a combination of curiosity, puzzlement, appreciation, and dismissiveness in the nearly six decades following his death. Whether seen as a visionary practitioner, a troubled patient, a trusted teacher, or an eccentric thinker, Boisen's legacy has not yet disappeared from the view of behavioral health practitioners and scholars. LaBat's volume is part biography of Boisen and part history of the development and early maturity of clinical pastoral education and institutional chaplaincy.
LaBat's comprehensive treatment of Boisen's life and impact provides both a helpful summary of prior assessments of Boisen and a renewed framing of Boisen as a figure worth attention not only by those interested in the origins of clinical pastoral education but also scholars or practitioners with interest in the experiences and commitments Boisen sought to understand holistically. LaBat argues that a reclaiming of Boisen's legacy requires “struggling with dualities that often appear irreconcilable: mysticism and psychosis, inspiration and illness, institution and the individual, science and religion” (7). Throughout the volume, LaBat brings both his training as a historian and the insight from his work as an institutional chaplain to his analysis of Boisen.
A comprehensive set of primary and secondary sources inform the volume. In addition to Boisen's own published work, extensive consultation of Boisen's personal correspondence enriches LaBat's narrative. LaBat draws from the work of historians, pastoral theologians, psychologists, psychiatrists, and others who have explored Boisen's life and contributions. Histories of pastoral care, medicine, and theories of religion, religious experience, and scientific method flow throughout LaBat's narrative.
Six chapters trace Boisen's experience of illness, his training, scholarly contributions, conversation partners, and LaBat's assessment of the import of these topics for the work of chaplains, pastoral theologians, and historians of religion and medicine. Chapter 1 addresses Boisen's often-entwined experiences of mental illness and spirituality and how that pairing informed his life's work. The chapter profiles how contemporaries and later commentators assessed Boisen's illness and how their reflections about it affirmed his insight or downplayed his credibility. LaBat highlights how “examples of Boisen in full psychosis have been used to exclude him from the mainstream of the profession he created” and to justify “dismissive treatment of him personally” (29). “Time and distance,” and additional analysis, LaBat argues, allows the possibility of reclaiming Boisen's insight and contributions. Chapter 2 delves more deeply into the ways Boisen made meaning from his illness and his “vivid spiritual experiences” (39). Throughout the text, LaBat refers to Boisen's combination of delusions and visions as “vilusions” (43). The second chapter profiles how “experience, illness, and wellness all operate within a larger social context beyond the experiencer” (60). Those factors for Boisen included early twentieth-century culture wars and the clergyman's attempts reconcile science and religion (60). Chapter 3 offers more insight into Boisen's interpretation of his own ailments via his attempt “to study his experience of illness and mysticism in a systematic, ‘scientific,’ manner” (68). Boisen, LaBat demonstrates, was convinced that spiritual experience borne out of illness could be productive and should serve as an anchor for both individual and societal betterment.
The second half of LaBat's text puts Boisen in conversation with his friends, colleagues, and skeptics. Chapter 4 makes a strong case that Boisen's health, chaplaincy program creation, theological pedagogy, scholarly work, and the legacy the combination of those elements produced would not have been possible without others. The support, compassion, companionship, guidance, access, and wisdom provided by a dedicated and diverse group of friends enabled and sustained Boisen's work. Physicians, theological educators, and other scholars willingly lent credibility to Boisen as he emerged from hospitalizations. They took his insights seriously and pointed him toward intellectual resources and other collaborators. Boisen's often fraught relationships with Alice Batchelder and Helen Flanders Dunbar appear here and throughout the volume. Chapter 5 displays the critiques of those who disagreed with Boisen's approaches or outright rejected his work. LaBat brings Steward Hiltner, Paul Pruyser, Henri Nouwen, and others into conversation with Boisen's impact and legacy. The fifth chapter also demonstrates how the clinical pastoral education movement that Boisen founded veered from Boisen's intentions as it adopted the “student-centered therapeutics” of Austrian psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich in opposition to the “patient-centered care Boisen championed” (129). Given Boisen's “driving and central vilusion” to unite “science and religion in amicable dialogue in service of truth, learning, and human well-being,” the final chapter outlines the scientific insight that informed Boisen's development of scientific chaplaincy (163).
Although this volume may not ameliorate the obscurity of Boisen that LaBat laments, his thorough treatment of Boisen life and work will prove valuable for those who find themselves curious about the clergyman's life and work, about the origins of chaplaincy in North America, or about attempts by twentieth century protestants to remedy perceived disconnections between “inspiration and illness, sacred and secular, science and religion” (166). LaBat makes a convincing case for continued engagement with Boisen's experiences, thought, and method.
