Good Psychology Requires Good Anthropology: What E. Christian Brugger Argued in 2008 — and Why It Still Matters

The problem is upstream

Jeremy Bentham put it plainly, and E. Christian Brugger quoted him without apology. 'Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure,' Bentham wrote in his Principles of Morals and Legislation. Brugger's point, delivered to the opening session of an Institute for Psychological Sciences summer seminar on August 11, 2008, was not that Bentham was strange but that he was representative. The utilitarian premise, Brugger argued, 'implicitly underlies conventional psychology's approach... towards the pursuit of happiness' and gets translated into what he called 'an ethically simplistic model of symptom reduction.'

That is a diagnostic claim, not a polemical one. Brugger was not attacking therapy. He was identifying where the fault line runs. When a psychology is built on the pleasure-pain axis, it can name what is maladaptive, but it cannot ask whether something ought to be done — that question gets bracketed as moral or spiritual rather than psychological. The practical consequences are exactly what practitioners at the Institute were already observing: pornography assessed as neutral unless usage becomes disruptive; marriage treated as presumptively dissoluble; the concept of gender adrift from any stable reference. These are not incidental failures. They follow from the anthropological premise.

The lecture was the first in a seminar series at IPS, the Arlington institution that would later become Divine Mercy University.[^1] Brugger placed it first deliberately. 'In order to speak about the more practical and empirically measurable dimensions of the mental life,' he said, 'we have to have some sort of an idea of the subject, which is the human person.'

Eight premises, one subject

The document Brugger distributed to participants — he noted it was already in its 17th revision — laid out eight 'irreducibly distinct but interrelated anthropological facts about the human person,' which the IPS faculty called domains. He was careful to say these are not a mere taxonomy. Each domain is a 'universal predicate of human nature, something always found in human nature... always there as part of the set of active potencies.' Understanding them is not optional for good clinical work because mental disorder, as Brugger framed it, is a psychosomatic reality shaped by 'the interaction between body, mind, and the external world.' Partial anthropologies yield partial therapies.

The eight premises divide along two axes. Three belong to theological anthropology: the human person is created, fallen, and redeemed. Five belong to philosophical anthropology, accessible without appeal to revelation: the person is bodily, interpersonally relational, rational, volitional, and substantially one. Brugger called the last four the 'big four' because they recurred most persistently in the faculty's clinical discussions.

This architecture should look familiar to anyone who has worked with the Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person formalized by Vitz, Nordling, and Titus. The three theological premises map directly onto the CCMMP's Created-Fallen-Redeemed arc. The five philosophical premises correspond to what the CCMMP treats as the structural domains of human nature through which mental health and disorder are expressed.[^2] What Brugger presented as a working document in 2008, still being tweaked and argued over by a faculty, the CCMMP published as a mature, referenced framework. The genealogy is traceable.

Created: persons, not organisms optimizing pleasure

Brugger drew a sharp contrast between Bentham's anthropology and what he called the Aristotelian-Thomistic account. Where Bentham defines happiness as 'the successful avoidance of pain and the attainment of pleasure,' Aquinas defines it as 'the bringing to completion of the complex capacities of human nature.' The difference is not philosophical hairsplitting. It determines what a therapist treats and what counts as cure.

The created premise anchors this. Human persons are made in the image of God, and that image is expressed through the big four: rationality, volition, relationality, embodiment. Dean Gladys Sweeney, who succeeded Brugger's colleagues at what became DMU, put the same point institutionally: the foundational philosophy is 'treating the human person as an integrated body-soul unity created for relation, freedom, rationality, and love.'[^3] The implication for therapy is that flourishing is not symptom-absence. Brugger defined it as 'a condition of interrelated good order in respect to all the domains capable of being ordered.'

This is the language of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics — Brugger explicitly referenced Book I — but it carries a theological charge absent from Aristotle. The person is not merely a natural being seeking natural fulfillment. The model, as Brugger described it, 'acknowledges that humans have not only natural desires, capacities and grounds for fulfillment, but also transcendent ones.' Any psychology that ignores the transcendent domain has not simply missed a department; it has misidentified the subject.

Fallen: why symptom reduction is not enough

The fallen premise is where Brugger's anthropology intersects most directly with the problem he diagnosed in Bentham. Concupiscence, understood in the Thomistic sense as disordered desire pulling the lower appetites against right reason, is not reducible to a symptom. It is a structural feature of post-lapsarian human nature. A therapy built purely on desire-satisfaction cannot name this disorder as disorder because desire is its own justification within a utilitarian framework.

Brugger did not use the word concupiscence in the lecture, but the logic is there. He illustrated it with the pornography example: conventional clinical psychology treats pornography use as neutral unless it becomes 'maladaptive,' meaning disruptive to daily patterns. But that framing already assumes that the thing itself is morally inert. An adequate anthropology says otherwise. The capacity for relational love, which belongs to the domain of interpersonal relationality, is damaged by habituated use of pornography whether or not the person experiences external disruption. The damage is to an anthropological domain, not merely to a behavioral pattern.

This is also where the CCMMP's fallen premise does its most practically clinical work. It is not simply the claim that humans sin. It is the claim that the very faculties through which mental health is constituted — reason, will, affective appetite, the relational self — are all subject to a real though not total disorientation. Therapy that ignores this will misread cooperation with that disorientation as progress.

Redeemed: the therapeutic horizon

Brugger was brief on the redeemed premise in this lecture, but its inclusion in the framework is structurally necessary. If the created premise establishes what the human person is for and the fallen premise accounts for the real disorder in which persons find themselves, the redeemed premise sets the horizon. Healing is possible, and it is not merely natural. The saving acts of God in Christ are, in the theological anthropology, part of the description of what the human person now is: a being for whom redemption is a real, not merely theoretical, potency.

For clinical practice, this means that the range of resources available to a person in therapy is not exhausted by technique. Grace, sacrament, prayer, and the theological virtues are anthropologically relevant. They are not decorative additions to a secular treatment plan; they operate on the domains where disorder is located. This was John Paul II's point when he called on clinicians to unite 'philosophical and theological anthropology' with 'the indisputable contributions of sciences like psychology' — a statement Brugger cited directly and used to justify the IPS project as a whole.

The 'big four' and what contemporary research adds

Brugger's recurring emphasis on the four philosophical domains — bodily, relational, rational, volitional — anticipates where the empirical literature has since moved most substantially.

On embodiment: decades of work in neurobiological development, including the research trajectory associated with Bruce Perry's Neurosequential Model, has confirmed that psychological disorder is not merely cognitive but is registered in the body's regulatory systems. The body is not an instrument the mind uses; it is constitutive of the self. Brugger's claim that mental health is a 'psychosomatic reality' now has a richer empirical substrate than he could cite in 2008.

On relationality: attachment research from Bowlby and Ainsworth forward has consistently shown that the relational domain is not peripheral but formative. The self is constituted in relation before it is constituted in isolation. Gabor Mate's work on addiction reinforces the same point from a different angle: disordered desire frequently traces back to relational deprivation, not merely to individual moral failure.

On rationality and volition: the ACT framework developed by Steven Hayes offers one secular account of how disordered thought patterns (cognitive fusion, experiential avoidance) can be addressed by strengthening psychological flexibility — the capacity to act in line with values rather than in response to immediate pain and pleasure. This is not the Thomistic account, but it is not incompatible with it. Where Hayes identifies 'values-based action,' Aquinas identifies the exercise of practical reason under virtue. The anthropological structure that makes either intervention meaningful is the same: a being capable of rational self-governance, not merely of conditioned response.

What this asks of practitioners

Brugger ended the lecture's framing section with a sentence that deserves to be read as a professional standard rather than a theoretical flourish: 'Good psychology presupposes good anthropology, and that which is best in the conventional field of clinical psychology is best because it is derived from true insights into the human person.'

This is a generous claim. It does not condemn secular psychology; it explains its best achievements. And it issues a corresponding challenge: if a practitioner cannot articulate what a human person is for, they cannot define what healing looks like beyond the relief of presenting symptoms. The anthropological premises Brugger distributed in 2008 — now formalized and extended in the CCMMP — are the attempt to supply that missing account.

The person who walks into a counseling office carries all eight domains at once. They are a body with a history, a relational self shaped by real or broken bonds, a rational agent capable of self-deception, a volitional subject with real freedom and real responsibility, a being created for something beyond pain-avoidance, wounded by a real disorder that is not merely learned behavior, and reachable by a grace that therapy alone cannot supply. Treating any of these as irrelevant is not clinical neutrality. It is an anthropological choice — and as Bentham's example shows, anthropological choices have consequences that reach all the way to what we call health.

References

[^1]: Fr. Charles Sikorski, LC, president of Divine Mercy University, the institution that grew from the Institute for Psychological Sciences; biographical context from institutional records.

[^2]: E. Christian Brugger, opening lecture, 'Anthropological Foundations of the Mental Life,' IPS Summer Seminar, August 11, 2008. All direct quotations from Brugger in this article are drawn from the audio transcript of this lecture.

[^3]: Dean Gladys Sweeney, introductory address at IPS, articulating the institute's foundational commitment to treating the human person as 'an integrated body-soul unity created for relation, freedom, rationality, and love.'