Tweedie, D. F., Jr. (1963). Mental illness. In D. F. Tweedie, Jr., The Christian and the couch: An introduction to Christian logotherapy (pp. 65-110). Grand Rapids, MI, US: Baker Book House.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/13103-003
Mental illness arises from a disruption in the process of personal growth and personality development. It is a disintegration of personal unity. This conflict state is characterized by feelings of threat and the reaction to the threatening situation either by fearful withdrawal or angry attack. The degrees of mental and emotional disorder are not clearly denned but are best conceived as points on a gradual continuum ranging from confident adjustment to life's challenges in good health to the total disorganization and withdrawal in the state of extreme illness. We have discussed the individual's resistance to disintegration in terms of lines of defense: defense mechanisms, neuroses, psychoses, and psychopathic character disorders. These defenses are essentially negative and self-defeating for they generate further defensive needs. The symptoms revealed in these defensive adjustments are expressions of the underlying causal forces which motivate the negative trend to mental illness. A great deal of research has been undertaken to identify these etiological, or casual, factors. In organic illnesses they seem to be the reaction of the physical dimension of personality, the body, to the stresses of the physical environment. Since this is the only dimension with empirically verifiable attributes, many have generalized these casual components to the whole range of mental illness. In our view of personality, these are seen rather as the deterioration of the personality due to the breakdown of the vehicle of the spirit, not the exclusive causal factors of mental illness. The functional disorders are those in which anxiety, the threat of the future, and guilt, the threat of the past, have broken down the positive functioning of the individual. There is both Biblical and empirical evidence to support the view that these can best be understood in terms of sin and its consequences in the executive function of the spiritual dimension of personality. If this be true, then it also involves the factor of personal responsibility which is necessary for the successful psychotherapeutic treatment of these disorders. If this be true, it is also a significant challenge for the Christian psychotherapist, for he alone has the insight and assets by which to redeem the wages of sin. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)