Anthropological Groundings:

The Person in Formation

Formators’ Integral Renewal and Enrichment (FIRE)

July 2022

Msgr. Jaime Noel Deslate / Fr. Philipp Neil Y. Antenor Cruz

Tagbadbad Foundation, Inc.
INTRODUCTION

Our assumed
anthropology affects our
understanding of the
world, our
relationships, our duties
and obligations, indeed,
our very “selves”.
11 PREMISES OF CCMMP

1.Created 7. Interpersonally
2.Fallen Relational
3.Redeemed 8.Sensory Perceptual
4.A Personal9.Emotional
Unity
5.Fulfilled 10.Rational
through
Vocations11.Volitional and
6.Fulfilled inFree
Virtue
 1. Created
“in the image” and “likeness” of God (Gen. 1:26)
• Inherently good
• Has dignity and value as persons. (uniqueness and special)
• A substantial unity, constituted of a material body and a
spiritual soul.
• Since God is a knowing and loving communion of persons
(Trinity of persons), humans are created as persons to
know the truth, especially about God, and to live in loving
communion with God and other persons.
• Flourishing
 1. Created
Theoretical Implication:

vs. reductionism (purely biological

individualistic perspective) and

vs. determinism (of

psychoanalytic and behavioral
theories
 1. Created
Practical Implication:
People are PERSONS, not just cases, or labels
The most disordered client has dignity

Persons with Low self esteem = lost sight of

their dignity and inherent value as children
of God.

Way of being (not just doing).

 2. Fallen

Human nature is fallen

sin, weakness, decay, death and
disorder at every level of human
existence are constitutive of human
temporal life, but are secondary to the
goodness of God’s creation.
 2. Fallen
Theoretical Implication

• Disorder and trials as part of human

existence
• Sin has consequences
• Goodness is foundational; evil is not.
 2. Fallen

Practical Implication

unconditional acceptance of the

dignity of the person vs.
disapproval/setting limits of the
person’s self-destructive choice
 3. Redeemed
• Sin, death and disorder are definitely overcome by
Jesus’ redemption; and in our temporal existence
radically relativized, that is, they can attain salvific
purposes.

• Human nature remains weakened by sin but can be

assisted, even healed and divinized divine grace.
Thus, persons can become holy.
 3. Redeemed
In and through Christ, by virtue of baptism, every human
person is:
• Invited into a relationship with God as God’s
adopted son or daughter.
• Called to a life of love of God and neighbor, and
• Called to the life of good works as personal
vocation (i.e., the unique and unrepeatable role
God has called each person in order to carry out
His divine plan of salvation to the world)
• Called to eternal beatitude in the life to come.
 3. Redeemed
Theoretical Implication
(avoid Two extremes):
1) Protestant reformers taught that original sin
radically perverted man and destroyed his
freedom, making the tendency to evil
insurmountable,
2) Pelagianism taught that man by the natural
power of free will and without the necessary
help of God’s grace, can lead a morally
good life, reducing Adam’s fault to a bad
example.
 3. Redeemed
Practical Implication

Despite sinful inclination, God has

redeemed man, enabling, sustaining, and
bringing him to rise above his sinful
situation with the ascent of his will and by
God’s grace.

No one is hopeless.
 4. A Personal Unity
• complete, substantially unified, living being constituted of
a material body and an immaterial, incorruptible, spiritual
soul;
• and in relationship to God, to the world, and to other
persons.
• Animate human nature includes multiple capacities
fulfillable at the organic, sensory, and rational level of the
person.
• Although body and soul are naturally inseparable such that
the act of any capacity is always and necessarily the act of
the person per se, for purposes of analysis, one
distinguishes using categories of human nature.
 4. A Personal Unity

Theoretical Implication:

Each person is a personal unity and

individual substance, with unique
human, moral, and spiritual goals

Physical body – spiritual soul unity

 4. A Personal Unity

Practical Implication:
• Integration of body, mind/psyche,
spirit (congruence)
• Culturally, historically, and
ecologically situated
• Challenges the individualist,
reductionist, relativist and dualist
approaches to the person.
 5. Fulfilled through Vocation

• By nature each person experiences a

desire for goodness and a call to flourish.

• The call to holiness enhances the call to

goodness and flourishing, since it is made
personal by God, who puts a desire in the
human heart for growth in holiness and
for communion.
 4. Fulfilled through Vocation

Theoretical Implication: 3 Levels of Vocation

1. Vocation to goodness, justice, or holiness
2. Vocational states: single, marriage, & consecrated or
ordained life
3. Call to work, service, meaningful leisure

Human beings are drawn toward the source of purpose and

meaning, which is the end or goal of human life.

Vocation innately promotes flourishing.

5. Fulfilled through Vocation

“The question, ‘what is

my vocation?’ means in
what direction should
my personality develop,
considering what I have
in me, what I have to
offer, and what others –
other people and God –
expect of me” (Wojtyla,
1993)
 5. Fulfilled through Vocation

Practical Implication
• Taking into account person’s vocation in doing
assessment and intervention
• Helping the person understand better their
vocation so as to provide intrinsically
meaningful and motivating therapeutic goals
• Helping the person draw upon their vocational
resources, with good effects for treatment
outcomes.
 5. Fulfilled in Virtue
“Virtues find roots in vocations, and vocations find
expression in virtues.”

Humans flourish or languish as a result of the

types of commitments they do or not.

Virtues perfect the natural inclinations and

capacities, by participating in the realization of
human goals and vocations.

On the other hand, vices lead to languishing.

 6. Fulfilled in Virtue
THEORETICAL IMPLICATIONS
Virtues lead to flourishing usually through persistent
effort and difficulty and vices as bringing suffering,
(often short term benefits).

Most basic human inclination is ultimate flourishing.

 6. Fulfilled in Virtue
13 PROPERTIES OF VIRTUE (integrated and
often overlapping)
1. Performative
2. Perfective and corrective
3. Purposeful
4. Ethical
5. Influenced by personal uniqueness, equal
innate dignity, sex difference, and
complementarity
6. Connective, relational, and developmental
 6. Fulfilled in Virtue
13 PROPERTIES OF VIRTUE (integrated and
often overlapping)
7. Learned through role models
8. Moderating
9. Preventive
10.Non-reductionist
11.Applied
12.Vocational
13.Open to the transcendent and God
 6. Fulfilled in Virtue

PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS: 3 Basic

Dimensions of Virtue

1. Act based (performative)

2. Agent- based (disposition)
3. Reason-based (involves good standards
from which virtues draw)
 7. Interpersonally Relational
Humans by nature are social, hence, have innate
inclinations and needs for life in society; as such they are:

Interpersonal: primarily developed in the family, of

which humans have natural need and inclination (that
is, for marriage and procreation).
Capable of friendships: which contribute to human
flourishing.
Communally situated: a community of persons,
expressed both in a socio-cultural and a civic-political
situation, which shape persons but do not totally
determine them.
 7. Interpersonally Relational
Theoretical Implication

Incongruent with inclination of some modern

psychology (humanistic and existential) that
absolutizes self-focus, self-actualization, self-
improvement, self-enhancement notions; even
spirituality is used to the service of the self
(New Age, Yoga, meditation)
 7. Interpersonally Relational
Practical Implication
• Catholic anthropology = self-gift (love of God and
neighbors) vs. mutual sexual exploitation.

• Trinitarian spirituality = unity in diversity. “Our

personhood is actualized through interpersonal
relationships: ‘person’ and ‘community’ are not two
exclusive concepts, but are intimately correlated. A
person becomes a person within a community, just
as a community is composed persons.”
 8. Sensory Perceptual

Persons are receptive to the external world through

the five senses.

As bodily, persons are:

Organic, living beings:

capable of bodily health and well-being; possessing
a natural inclination to preserve and promote their
bodily well-being.
 8. Sensory Perceptual

Either male or female:

male and female are complementary embodiments
of the one being we call the human person (equal
but neither identical nor ontologically mutually
exclusive);
this complementarity has a nuptial significance
which is revealed and actualized through the
“disinterested gift of self”, typified both in marital
love and in celibate forms of self giving.
 8. Sensory Perceptual

Sensory and perceptional:

through sense cognition and appetition persons

perceive, human persons takes interest in and
interact with the sensible world around them;
all human knowledge, whether sensory or
intellectual, begins with sense perceptions.
 8. Sensory Perceptual
Motoric:
persons move themselves as response
primarily to cognitive perceptions that is either
sought and avoided;

Historically located:
persons are situated in history and are shaped
but not totally determined by their historical
situation.
 8. Sensory Perceptual
Theoretical Implication

person has limitations, part of development is

both growth and regression

Perception is not always objective reality but

reveals the reality of the person and how the
person responds to the world. It can be
challenged, modified or changed.
 9. Emotional
Persons are emotionally attuned.

Emotions are inherently good. They reveal the

truth of the person.

Emotion stays with the person. They do not

disengage with suppression or repression
 9. Emotional

Theoretical Implication

Emotional experience is neutral.

Emotional expression can be adaptive or

maladaptive, moral or immoral.
 9. Emotional

Practical Implication

growth in affective maturity.

emotional schemas are learned, they can

also be unlearned.
 10. Rational
Persons are capable of knowing
• themselves, others and God.
• The created order (natural, universal
law).
• Truth, including divinely revealed truth.
• Good and evil, and that good is to be
done and pursued, and evil avoided.
 10. Rational
Persons are capable of knowing
• concrete moral norms that guide human action
in accordance with good and away from evil.
• that he knows (self-consciousness)
• and appreciating beauty; they are aesthetic
beings.

Humans have the rational inclinations to seek and

know the truth and find happiness
 10. Rational

Theoretical Implication

Against Constructivism (post modernism):

inability to know objective truth; one

constructs truth in relation to one’s life’s
perspective and culture.
 10. Rational
Practical Implication
There is objective truth that gives order and
happiness to the person. Truth does not rely on
the person; but in the created order (natural law
is written and engraved in the soul of each and
every man [CCC 1954])
Psychotic disorders have limited ability to
control and use their cognitive faculties. Even
in less severe disorders (distorted or faulty
thought) may have some difficulty exercising
cognitive faculties.
 11. Volitional and Free
Persons are the subject of moral action, capable
of free-choice (agents = free, primary actor and
the unifying original source of action). As such
they are:
• Responsible
• Self-determining of their moral character
(that is, dispositions of their minds, wills
and affect).
• Creative: like God by analogy, they are able
to conceive of and deliberately bring into
existence things that once were not.
• Capable of love of natural and divine goods
and persons.
 11. Volitional and Free
Freedom is the power, rooted in reason and will,
to act or not to act, to do this or that, and so to
perform deliberate actions on one’s own
responsibility (CCC 1731)

Although they are free, persons are limited by multiple

factors to varying degrees.
They have volitional inclinations to actualize diverse
human goods (and with baptism, divine goods).
The development of human freedom involves freedom
from undue limitation and freedom for growth in one’s
capacity to choose good and avoid evil.
 11. Volitional and Free
Theoretical Implication

Determinism: machine-like mental processes to

explain why we do things.

Construction of freedom as equivalent to individualism or

autonomy: one can do whatever he chooses regardless of the
consequences of the action, or its meaning in the society of
culture. “it is the nature of the will to seek good; there is no
true freedom except in the service of what is good and just
(Rom 6;17)”. Freedom is thus viewed in terms of self-mastery
as demonstrating the ability to seek that which is truly good,
not as radical individualism or autonomy.
 11. Volitional and Free
Practical Implication
Respect of autonomy of the person. No manipulation or
intimidation of freedom.

In organic disease (schizophrenia), character problem

(personality disorder), and emotional blocks (anxiety and
depression) that limits freedom, the goal of therapy is assist
the client in overcoming the obstacles that impair the full
exercise of freedom to better respond to God’s love and love
others.
 SIN AND CCC 387: Without the
DISORDER knowledge that revelation
gives of God, we cannot
The reality of sin, recognize sin clearly and are
though not totally tempted to explain it as merely
a developmental flaw, a
accepted by secular psychological weakness, a
psychology, is a mistake, or the necessary
profound reality that consequence of an
inadequate social structure…
must be understood only in the knowledge of God’s
and placed in context plan for man can we grasp that
for a Catholic is an abuse of freedom that
God gives to created persons
psychotherapy to be so that they are capable of
complete. loving him and loving one
another.
What is the distinction of sin and disorder?

Sin is the result of abuse of freedom.

Evil as privation (the absence of

something), manifested in a complex and
varied possibilities in the different areas of
human nature: Physiological/bodily,
Relational/social, Individual/integrated
person (cognition and affect).
 SIN and SUFFERING

Suffering is unique to humans.

Although animals experience pain, only human

beings know and wonders on why they are
suffering.

Modern psychology, considers suffering negatively.

It emphasizes on self-help and coping to decrease
pain and increase self-control. Most therapists try
to “cure” suffering.
For Christians, not all suffering is negative. We
distinguish between necessary and unnecessary
suffering. Unnecessary suffering by all means
have to be avoided or even eradicated. This is
mostly the consequence of sin.

Necessary suffering however promotes meaning

and is essential to growth. While suffering is not a
sure road to growth, growth does not take place
without it. Avoiding necessary suffering, does not
help us escape pain but only stifles growth.
Positive psychological effects of suffering

• greater awareness of life

• greater capacity for joy
• understanding brokenness of others
• letting go of the illusion of control
• knowing there is greater purpose
• deeper understanding of the life
after.
• At the practical level, persons who come to
treatment because they are suffering, regardless
if it is a consequence of freely choosing to turn
away from God (personal sin), or as a result of
some barrier to their freedom (original sin), it is
important to discern if the individual’s problem
is primarily (but not solely) spiritual or
psychological.

• If suffering is determined to be primarily a

result of free choice, the suffering may be
considered as a component of a spiritual
disorder, the better intervention is through
spiritual direction and return to the sacrament.
• If suffering is determined to be primarily a
psychological problem, that is, afflicted
with disorders that restrict their freedom,
psychological intervention is needed.

• If suffering is a mixture of free choice and

psychological/emotional illness, both
spiritual and psychological interventions
are recommended. However, the role of the
therapist must be kept in perspective.
• Therapists can need to have humility to recognize
that they cannot fill all the voids and gaps in a
person’s life.

• As Catholic therapists, we do not assume to end all

suffering through unconditional positive regard or
any means. While we do our best, within our
human limits to fulfill the biblical mandate
(whatever you do…), we must be mindful that the
true healer is Christ, who will ultimately fill the
void in the lives of people who suffer disorder or
trauma.