I have long held the position that at least many, perhaps most, psychiatrists and psychologists function, in effect, as a secular priesthood.

That is to say that a large part of their role is to enforce religious norms (which they pretend to be non-religious because they are not necessarily associated with any traditional religion) on the public.

This is exactly the sort of social control that the First Amendment of the United States Constitution was written to protect us from, which the authors of that document had observed among the Puritans of Massachusetts and Connecticut, and found detestable.

Those who inherited the Puritan sensibility have turned the tables, however, by pretending that their programs of social control are no longer religious - in fact, they have vociferously derided the religious beliefs of their forebears - but they have retained the systems of social control which made their forebears so detested among their contemporary peers, and they have used governmental power to enforce their quasi-religious beliefs on their hapless neighbors who want no part of it.




Baldur