On the Neocatechumenal Way’s war with psychology
A movement with a problem with psychology
The Neocatechumenal Way has a long, settled, and explicit suspicion of psychology. You don’t have to infer it — it is written into their catecheses. In the Initial Catechesis and the First Scrutiny Kiko Argüello, the Way’s founder, takes on Freud by name, sets him beside Marx and Nietzsche as rival explainers of human misery, and dismisses them in a sentence. Absorbing psychology and sociology, the catechesis warns, “technicizes the Church.” The priest who learns it “no longer speaks to you of Jesus Christ; he does psychoanalysis with you instead.” The catechesis also casts the psychiatrist as “the priest of the modern world.” Kiko concludes by saying: once you notice that “Freud’s psychology says religion is a neurosis,” the damage is done.
This is not an incidental prejudice. It follows from the Way’s whole picture of the human being, which is built on a single biblical hinge, Hebrews 2:14–15: man is enslaved through the fear of death. Sin, in this telling, is “an experience of death at the existential and ontological level”; the fear of death makes love impossible; the person who cannot love becomes an idolater who demands life from money, work, and the regard of others. The frame is totalizing. If that is what is exclusively wrong with you, then psychology — which could propose complementary accounts of why you suffer and other routes out — is not a neutral discipline. It is a competitor.
The man who gives it a face
Which brings us to José Luis Marín Moreno. He is worthy of attention not because he is the originator of any of this — he isn’t — but because he is its most articulate and credentialed public voice, and because of what he is actually in charge of.
Marín (born in Murcia in 1968, and not to be confused — of all people — with a Madrid psychiatrist of the same name) holds a doctorate in philosophy and a licentiate in ecclesiastical studies, taught anthropology and ethics for years at the Murcia branch of the Pontifical John Paul II Institute, and runs a podcast, Tras el sentido, that bills itself as critical thinking for confused times. He presents his framework under the banner of antropología adecuada, “adequate anthropology” — a phrase he takes directly from John Paul II’s Theology of the Body. He also speaks as though he treats people, citing his daily practice and those “helped seriously” in their problems “only with the help of grace.” And, most concretely, he is the figure associated with the Way’s own programme for people struggling with pornography — its in-house answer to what the secular world calls compulsive or addictive use. So when Marín talks about why psychology is the wrong frame and slavery is the right one, this is not a freelance opinion. It is, in effect, the operating theory behind a pastoral programme that real people in distress are routed into.
That is why he is worth reading closely. Two episodes of his programme make the case in full: one on “the danger of sentimentalism in the Church,” one on “pornolatry, the slavery of desire.” Take them seriously and you can see exactly what the Neocatechumenal stance on psychology is, where it comes from, and what it does to the people it reaches.
The thesis
Marín’s “adequate anthropology” is not simply the Catholic doctrine of the human person. It is the rendering of Neocatechumenal catechesis in academic dress. The framework works by making sin the hinge of everything — a hamartiocentric anthropology, centered on sin — while staying conspicuously quiet about the prior and greater Christian claim that the human being is made in the image of God. Its war on psychology doesn’t seem, at bottom, to be a defense of the soul against reductionism; it seems much more the protection of an explanatory monopoly. A manufacturing of the same guilt and fear it then offers to cure. All this delivered to suffering people as something that sounds clinical, actively steering them away from help that works.
The masters of suspicion
The grouping Kiko reaches for — Marx explains you by economics, Freud explains you by your complexes, and, in the catecheses, Nietzsche hovering nearby as the third — is not original either. It is one of the most famous formulas in twentieth-century thought: Paul Ricœur’s école du soupçon, the “school of suspicion,” coined in his 1965 book on Freud. In it Ricœur names Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud as the three masters who taught us to read consciousness as a mask. And, most probably, this was received by Kiko at second or third hand through the francophone Catholic intellectual air of the postconciliar decades.
What makes it ironic is that Ricœur did not name the three in order to dismiss them. His entire argument was that suspicion had to be passed through — that Marx and Nietzsche and Freud performed a necessary demolition of naïve, first-order religious consciousness, and that a mature faith (a favorite expression in the Way), what he called a “second naïveté,” was reachable only on the far side of taking them seriously and not by simply refusing them. Ricœur spent five hundred pages reading Freud closely precisely because he thought you were not allowed to wave him away. Kiko, and Marín after him, take the same three names and do the one thing the formula’s author said you must not do: brandish them as a list of enemies.
And here the second problem, because of how the Way transmits anything. Kiko’s formulation does not stay with Kiko. It is reproduced, largely uncritically, by a catechetical apparatus of thousands of catechists across continents, whose register is fixed by design. The catecheses are delivered, not discussed; the same phrases recur verbatim across decades because fidelity to the itinerary is the whole point. In a movement that runs on announcements, catechesis and scrutiny, “dialogue” and “critical thinking” is structurally closer to a problem than a value — a catechist who started genuinely arguing with the material, rather than transmitting it, would not be doing the job as defined. So a truncation introduced once at the top does not get corrected on the way down. The inversion propagates, and by this mechanism a borrowed-and-inverted formula becomes the settled, unexamined mind of a movement, repeated by people who have never been in a position to test it and were never meant to.
Strawmanning Freud
Begin with the facts, because Marín gets them wrong. Freud is not “the father of psychology.” He is rather the father of psychoanalysis — one school, and not the dominant one for a long time now. Experimental psychology as a discipline has other founders entirely. Beside that, psychology, or rational psychology, has existed since Plato and Aristotle in Western thought. Collapsing the field of experimental or clinical psychology into Freud so that dismissing Freud dismisses the field is not a small slip for a man trading on philosophical rigor.
And it is a strawman, because Marín isn’t arguing with Freud; he is arguing with a cartoon of Freud. He engages him at the level of ideology — atheist, therefore poison — never at the level of theory. Freud had real problems. People didn’t like him. Jung broke with him over precisely his reductionism of libido and the contempt for religion. The later history of the field is one long argument with Freud, not a blank endorsement of him. “He thought religion was a neurosis” is treated as a conversation-ender, when it is just a claim, one that anyone is free to reject on the merits, with reasons.
Even psychoanalysis did not stay where Freud left it; it was challenged and partly outgrown from within. John Bowlby, trained as a psychoanalyst, broke with classical drive theory precisely because it could not see the bond between child and caregiver as real and primary rather than a by-product of feeding. Out of that break came one of the most empirically supported frameworks in all of psychology: attachment theory, which says that early relationships, security, separation, and loss shape how a person loves and fears for the rest of life. Marín neither engages it nor mentions it. He waves at “Freud, atheist” and moves on.
Freud’s parable
There is a scene worth holding next to all of this — something Freud said, in his lectures at Clark University in 1909, his only visit to America, to explain repression. Suppose, he says, a man in this audience is making a disturbance, laughing and scraping his feet and breaking my concentration; some strong listeners get up and throw him out. He is now “repressed,” and the lecture goes on. Men sit by the door as the “resistance,” to keep him from forcing his way back. But the repression miscarries: the ejected man, embittered, hammers on the door and shouts from the corridor and disrupts things worse than before. And then the host goes out, speaks with the man, and proposes that the room let him back in on the promise of better behavior. They agree, the repression stops, and quiet returns. “This,” Freud tells the audience, “is in fact a fairly good presentation of the task devolving upon the physician in the psychoanalytic therapy of neuroses.”
This story reads like a parable. The cure, in Freud’s own teaching, is not throwing the disturber out and posting guards. That is the illness. The cure is bringing the banished thing back into the room and letting it speak. The most important move Freud ever made was arguably not a particular theory at all; it was this stance: that the suffering, deviant, embarrassing part of a person — the part the respectable world wants removed from the hall — has to be heard rather than barred, because barring it is precisely what makes people ill. And there is something deeply Christian in that, whether Freud knew it or not: the lost one is sought, the cast-out is brought back in, healing happens by welcome and not by exclusion. Now set the question that matters beside it. When the Way meets a person’s suffering, does it bring that suffering into the room and listen to what it is actually saying? Or is it interpreted, judged, and rejected; routed into scrutinies and posting catechists at the door? You can decide for yourself which side of his own metaphor the Way is standing on.
Skinner, another easy target
Skinner gets the same ideological treatment. Skinner was a doctrinaire behaviorist who really did, more or less, deny the inner life — no freedom, no dignity in the metaphysical sense, just conditioning. Marín picks the two figures whose most extreme formulations are easiest to refute — the dogmatic drive-theory Freudian and the dogmatic behaviorist — holds up their worst version, and lets the reader assume the whole field of psychology looks like that. It doesn’t. The field spent the twentieth century arguing its way out of both.
The contradictions
“Psychology is suspect because Freud was an atheist” is a genetic fallacy of the textbook kind, taught in the first fortnight of any logic course: whether a claim is true has nothing to do with what the person who first made it believed. Run the reasoning anywhere else and it collapses — genetics would be discredited because Mendel was a friar, the Big Bang theory would be suspect because Lemaître was a priest. The fallacy is elementary.
Then the line the whole pastoral case rests on: pornography use is not an addiction, it’s slavery. Calling pornography an addiction, he says, “removes responsibility” and “admits the impossibility of getting out,” so we should say slavery instead. In psychology there are good arguments not to label pornography use as an addiction, but this is not one of them. Slavery means precisely that you are not free and not in control. That is the entire point of the word. If “slave to sin” still leaves a person free and responsible, then so does “addiction,” because the clinicians who use the term “addiction” are already factoring in the patient’s agency for recovery. And if “slavery” means what it says, it strips out responsibility at least as hard as the word he threw away. The distinction does nothing. It only lets him keep the language of guilt while disowning one that is morally neutral.
There is also a kind of opportunism that is inherited. The same catechesis by Kiko that spends pages demolishing psychology then leans on it when convenient: “this is why money and affection are so bound together, as psychology says today.” Psychology is junk when it “explains sin away” and a reliable authority when it backs the sermon. Marín does the same — psychology “changes every three or four years” and can’t be trusted, right up until he draws on Freud’s libido, Bernays and mass psychology, or words like anxiety and dopamine.
And “changes every three or four years” is not even true. What would it mean — that the field swaps its findings wholesale on a clock? It just doesn’t. Validated treatments do not evaporate every few years. It’s not that there aren’t real problems in the field — the replication crisis is one of them, for instance. But notice what that crisis actually is: the discipline auditing itself, in public, under its own evidentiary standards, and correcting course. That is the opposite of the unaccountable fashion-parade Marín describes. A field that revises itself under evidence is doing what a science is supposed to do.
Which is the place to say the obvious thing about the brand. Tras el sentido sells itself as critical thinking for confused times. The times are confused — every age has been — but this is not what critical thinking looks like. It is motivated reasoning wearing critical thinking’s coat.
The closed loop
Marín’s framework ultimately cannot fail. Not “rarely fails” — cannot, by construction. Follow it and stay unwell, and the framework has an answer ready: you didn’t really convert, didn’t fight hard enough, didn’t truly hand it over to Christ, you are still secretly an idolater of your own self. His diagnosis is unfalsifiable and so is the treatment, which leaves only one variable to carry the blame for failure: the person.
A depressed or compulsive person is told the problem is spiritual, that therapy is at best a crutch, that the real cure is conversion. They try. It doesn’t lift, because depression and compulsion frequently do not lift on devotion alone. And now the system that promised everything has nowhere to put that failure except on their soul. They didn’t believe enough. They held something back. The loop closes on the most vulnerable person in the room and tells them it is their fault. A framework that can only ever be confirmed, and that routes every disconfirmation back onto the sufferer as guilt, is not a path out of guilt and fear. It is a machine for producing more of it. And the defense usually offered against this — that the Way’s statute contains a clause respecting conscience — cannot establish that conscience is genuinely protected either. The framework has preemptively undermined the very faculty the clause protects. A person told, week after week, that their interior life is structured by idolatry, the fear of death, and self-love is no longer in a position to trust their own dissent. The consent it produces is not the free exercise of conscience but a managed capitulation. This is a structural observation, provable from the publicly available architecture without a single anecdotal report: the formal commitment to conscience and the operative catechetical machinery are at odds with each other, and the machinery is going to win every time, because it reclassified dissent itself as spiritual pathology.
Saint Mark Ji Tianxiang
Marín reaches for Saint Mark Ji Tianxiang — the Chinese physician, opium addict, and martyr — and draws all the wrong conclusions from him. Look at his life. Mark Ji was a devout Catholic doctor who treated the poor for free, fell ill with a stomach ailment, was given opium for the pain, and could not stop. He confessed it again and again, the same thing every time, wanting to be free of it, unable to be. His confessor — reasoning almost exactly as Marín reasons — concluded that a man who keeps relapsing must lack a firm purpose of amendment, and refused him absolution. For roughly thirty years Mark Ji was barred from confession and the Eucharist. He kept coming anyway: Mass for three decades as a spectator at the communion he could not receive, prayer, his family raised in the faith. In 1900 he was arrested in the Boxer Rebellion, refused to apostatize, asked to be killed last so none of his family would die alone, and was martyred. John Paul II canonized him in 2000.
Now read what that says. First, it is direct evidence that addiction is an illness in the psychiatric sense and not merely a slack will. The whole modern judgment on the case is precisely that the confessor lacked what we now know: that the craving was not weak character but a compulsion that genuinely reduced his freedom to resist. Second, Mark Ji kept participating in the life of the Church even after its own minister shut the sacraments on Marín’s exact logic: if you cannot overcome it, the failure is in your will, so you are not really repentant. It is the same logic the closed loop runs on. Third, and most decisively: he was able to be a martyr because he already was living in sanctifying grace, despite being an opium addict. Which means that through all those years in an objective situation the Church calls grave sin, grace was at work in him — that the objective gravity and Mark Ji’s culpability were not the same thing, that a person can be bound and still be in friendship with God. That is not a liberal gloss; it is the Catholic teaching on reduced culpability and the conditions of mortal sin at full display, and it is exactly the pastoral point Pope Francis pressed in Amoris Laetitia. Marín’s framework ignores all of this. The saint Marín invokes is the standing refutation of the system Marín is selling.
What “sentimentalism” really means
His definition is clean enough. Emotions are primary defensive sensations; feelings are emotions stretched out and rationalized; “sentimentalism” is reducing the whole of life, religion included, to feeling. Fine. But watch where the word travels once he is using it. It stretches to cover worship with contemporary music, movements that are clearly emotional (he is looking at you, Hakuna), the language of self-esteem, the very idea that the young might suffer from low self-esteem, and meditation that brings calm.
By then “sentimentalism” no longer means “reducing everything to feeling.” It means consolation — empathy, reassurance, calm, relief. His actual counter-thesis is that the problem is not low self-esteem but high self-esteem — that we are “inflated with esteem” — and that the evangelical fix is desprecio a sí mismo… odio a sí mismo, “self-contempt, self-hatred.” Compassion, emotional relief, and self-acceptance get reclassified as spiritual dangers, while guilt and shame are promoted as the proper Christian baseline. “Sentimentalism” is the label under which empathy itself becomes suspect. A message whose practical result is that people distrust their own relief from suffering and cultivate contempt for themselves is not a neutral observation about human nature. It is a way of keeping people inside guilt and fear — the exact affects the Neocatechumenal kerygma needs intact to present itself as the only way out.
“CBT helps in some cases”
He grants that cognitive-behavioral and other therapies are good and can help in some dysfunctions. Sounds measured. It is a quiet falsehood. CBT is among the most heavily tested treatments in the history of clinical psychology, with good evidence of efficacy across most of its main uses — depression, the anxiety disorders, OCD, PTSD, and insomnia among them — often matching or beating medication and lasting longer. “Helps in some cases” is not a careful reading of that evidence; it is a way of shrinking it.
And on whose authority? Marín is not a clinical psychologist or a psychiatrist; he is a philosopher who says he has “studied these psychotherapies in depth.” He is also addressing people already disposed to distrust secular psychology, for whom the nod to CBT works as inoculation — see, I’m not anti-science — rather than as engagement with what the science says.
Compulsive pornography use is not a standalone diagnosis in the DSM, so — the implication runs — the addiction frame is bogus. This gets the manual backwards. The DSM is not Scripture; it is a cautious, committee-built, politically negotiated document, and many conditions it does not list as standalone entries are treated every day on sound clinical grounds. The reason compulsive pornography use is not its own DSM entry has at least as much to do with the manual’s own conservatism and secular bias as with anything about the phenomenon. And here is the part that undoes the point: the manuals do recognize compulsive sexual behavior — the ICD-11 explicitly — and the clinicians who treat problematic pornography use treat it, in practice, with the tools of addiction medicine: relapse prevention, urge management, the behavioral and cognitive methods built for compulsion.
The territory he actually wants
The claim that evidence-based therapies basically cannot deliver “definitive” healing is asserted and cannot be shown, because he has defined “definitive healing” from the outset as the thing only grace provides. He is completely collapsing spiritual and psychological healing and claiming the whole psyche for his method. He would of course argue that Christ heals the whole person, but it is doubtful that he himself would take holy water and say a prayer to treat heart disease — a distinction must exist somewhere.
Step back and ask why a movement needs an “anthropology” that does all this — flattens psychology into one atheist, refuses the category of illness, recodes relief as danger, and closes every loop back onto the believer. The answer is that psychology is competition, and the Way knows it. Both offer a suffering person the same three things: an account of why you hurt, a method for getting better, and a relationship in which the work happens. When a psychologist can give someone a credible explanation of their pain and a route through it that demonstrably works, the movement’s monopoly on meaning is broken. The person no longer exclusively needs a community to interpret their own interior life. So the field cannot be engaged or corrected on specifics; it has to be discredited wholesale — declared atheist at the root and structurally incapable of “definitive” healing — and its offerings turned into threats, so that self-acceptance reads as pride, relief as sentimentalism, and trusting your own conscience as the deception. What looks like theology is, functionally, a territorial claim: the interior life belongs to us, and anyone offering an independent way through it is selling idols. A confident tradition does not need to do this; an insecure one does.
Clinical work without clinical accountability
Let’s strip the theological vocabulary and look at what the Way’s pornography programme actually is. It is a structured intervention for a condition that causes real psychological distress and functional impairment. It has a conceptual model of the disorder, regular contact with designated guides, a prescribed pathway through stages, and a framework for judging progress and relapse. Functionally, that is a treatment programme, and the people entering it are in genuine distress — some with co-occurring depression, anxiety, or trauma histories the programme has no means to detect, let alone address.
The guides running it have no clinical training, no supervised practice, no ethical code governing conduct with vulnerable people, and no professional body to answer to if they cause harm — while actively steering those people away from professional help by framing it as spiritually insufficient. Imagine a secular organization operating an equivalent programme: a structured intervention for a distressing condition, a vulnerable population, untrained facilitators, and explicit discouragement of professional treatment. It would face immediate regulatory and ethical scrutiny, and rightly so. The pastoral label changes none of the things that matter — not the population, not the nature of the intervention, not the potential for harm. It removes only the accountability. That is the whole of the difference, and it runs entirely in the programme’s favour and against the people in it.
Why the hatred of Rogers, of all people
Rogers’s offence, in Marín’s telling, is that his therapy is “centered on the client” — that it trusts the person to find their own answer, that it treats the human being as someone who can, with a non-judging presence beside them, move toward their own healing. Marín calls this a profound deception.
Notice what is actually being rejected. Not atheism — Rogers’s method makes no argument about God. What is rejected is the idea that an ordinary person can be trusted with their own conscience and their own direction. That is the threat. Rogers’s unconditional positive regard, his refusal to coerce, his patience with a person’s own pace, treats individual conscience with more respect than the documented practice of Neocatechumenal scrutinies. A movement built on group correction, public disclosure of one’s life, and catechists who tell you what is wrong with you has structural reasons to despise a therapy whose first principle is that you are not there to be steered. The hostility to Rogers is not theological. It is about who gets to hold authority over a person’s interior life.
The thing they leave out
Here is what should be unmissable and somehow goes missing. For all the talk of “revealed” or “adequate anthropology,” which has the effect of making a particular movement’s view sound like the settled mind of the Church, the Neocatechumenal picture of the human being is built almost entirely on sin, the fall, slavery, the wound, the fear of death. Read pages of it and you can forget there is anything else. And there is something else — the first and load-bearing thing the Catholic Church says about the human person: that man is created in the image and likeness of God.
That is not a footnote. The Imago Dei is the foundation the entire Catholic teaching on human dignity stands on. It is why the person has worth before doing anything, before any conversion. It is the premise of the Church’s social teaching, its defense of life, its account of conscience. To build a “revealed anthropology” that leads with what looks like total depravity, death-anxiety, and the absolute incapacity to love while the image and likeness of God in a person barely registers is not a difference of emphasis. It is leaving out the keystone.
And it is hard not to notice why this omission and not some other. An anthropology that begins “you bear the image of God; you have inviolable worth no failure can cancel” does not make people dependent on a group; it grounds dignity in something prior to and untouchable by any community. An anthropology that begins “you are a slave, wounded, encircled by the fear of death, unable to love” creates exactly the deficit the movement then offers to fill. One story makes a free person. The other makes a person who needs you. The Way preaches the second and is conspicuously quiet about the first, and once you see that, much of the rest stops looking like theology and starts to look like something else.
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