Elwood Worcester and the emmanuel therapy: Scientific psychology, modern Christianity, and the problem of religious healing

Episcopal rector Rev. Elwood Worcester founded the Class for the Treatment of Nervous Disorders (popularly known as the Emmanuel Movement) in 1906, as part of the larger social gospel interests of Emmanuel Church, Boston. Worcester had gained a doctorate in philosophy/psychology at the University of Leipzig, and spent several years teaching college courses in psychology. His exposure to physicians in Philadelphia and Boston led him to consider if he could utilize his training in psychology as another avenue of enacting both the Christian social gospel and his pastoral duty as a healer of emotional, mental, and spiritual imbalance. Working with the explicit support of leading physicians, Worcester, along with his associate Rev. Samuel McComb, began to practice psychotherapeutic suggestion and hypnosis upon sufferers of neuroses and functional disorders.; The sources that combined to induce Worcester's psychotherapeutic treatment of nervous disorders included philosophical, psychotherapeutic, theological, and sociocultural factors. German experimental psychologists Gustav T. Fechner and Wilhelm M. Wundt supplied the theories of mind and body that could counter the rise of reductive materialism, as well as stress the importance of both sides of the mind-body relationship. The clinical psychological practice of psychotherapeutic suggestion and hypnosis provided practical means by which sufferers of neuroses and functional disorders could find relief and healing; illnesses of purely physiological origin remained the province of physicians, whereas those with a psychological foundation could only be cured by psychotherapy, such as that performed by Worcester. In fact, contemporary critical analyses of biblical scripture indicated that Jesus Christ was aware of the principles of psychotherapy and used them to perform his healing miracles. Worcester envisioned his therapeutic project as helping to save a Western civilization whose denizens could no longer meet the daily challenges, succumbing to nervousness and psychological illness. Worcester worried, though, that Americans were seeking succor in the new healing movements of faith-healing, New Thought, and Christian Science, many of which rejected modern medicine. Worcester argued that his therapeutic practice, though, combined traditional Christianity with the cooperation of modern scientific physicians and psychologists, thus demonstrating the ultimate unity of mind and body, religion and science.