Do you realize that just about every person today is willing to agree with you when you say that some kind of confession is necessary for ridding oneself of one's worries and anxieties? Where once upon a time most Catholics would take their mental troubles to a priest, the Protestant would go to a psychoanalyst. Today however, many Catholics are surrendering to the psychoanalyst where the confession of sin and spiritual misery is met with sympathetic and intelligent treatment.

But there is a difference between the two, so let us keep our eyes open. In fact, there is a world of difference between Psychoanalysis, the secularized form of confession, and the sacrament of penance, the Divine Psychologists amazing invention for the restoration of peace to the soul and joy to the troubled conscience. One is a production of man, the other a sacrament of God.

A clear line of distinction must be drawn between the action of the Catholic confessor and the action of the analyst. A young priest who was ordained only yesterday can do what the analyst of twenty years standing cannot do: God's anointed can forgive sins in God's name! The most the analyst can do, with all the good will in the world, is to bring his patient to understand and forgive himself. By any measure this is a long way from throwing him into the arms of the merciful Lord.

Some people are ready to forgive themselves seventy times seven, to heap excuse upon excuse and pretex upon pretex for backing up their right to sin. But that does not mean that God is granting them the forgiveness for which they don't even bother to ask Him.
Confession is creeping back into the secular world in disguise. The world's confessional has a comfortable chair or more often a comfortable couch to rest on. Hundreds who wouldn't have been caught dead in a standard Catholic confessional are now finding it quite all right and fashionable to go to their own lay father confessor, alias the psychiatrist. They tell him their symptoms and if that is not enough they blurt out their sins.

All this amounts to a backhanded compliment to the Church Whose Founder died to institute the Sacrament of Penance. Psychiatry is going out of its way to tell Catholicism: "Your Christ's recognition of a human need to acknowledge wrongdoing indeed tallies with the profound psychological truth. Your system of confessing is so marvelous an agent for personal peace that we are using it nowadays to bind up spiritual wounds and restore peace of mind to men. We cannot forgive sins, but we can help our patients to forget them.

This may be quite all right as far as it goes, this business of helping people over rough spots, but the Catholic has to admit that it does not go far enough. Maximum peace of mind and happiness can be reached only if the sin is confessed and wiped out in the Blood of Christ. The clever and well intentioned doctors of the mind can excuse sin, explain it, dress it up in apparent decency, but they can never declare that All-Mighty
God has wiped them out from His Books!

An eminent psychiatrist tells of having seen with his own eyes clear proof of the efficacy of sacramental absolution in bringing peace and happiness back to the soul.
One Saturday afternoon this practitioner was kneeling in the back of a Catholic church when he noticed a sixteen-year-old girl who was visibly tense and tormented. She twisted about nervously and could not keep still. It was plain to see that a great inner turmoil was robbing her of peace. When he could see her face in the full light, its distress could be read like an open book. She seemed to be anxiety personified. This is what the psychiatrist had to say:

"A few moments later she got up, and went into the confessional. I also got up from my knees, and walked to the altar to kneel before the Blessed Sacrament. Time passed quickly there. Then someone pushed by me - and knelt down on the altar steps, just a few feet away from me. It was the same girl. But I have never seen such a change in any human being. All her tenseness was gone; the lines of worry had been smoothed from her face. No signs of mental torment now; no anxiety - only perfect relaxation - peace - and, apparently, a great happiness, for her lips were parted in a smile. If I, as a psychiatrist could have done for that girl in three hours, what had been accomplished in fifteen minutes, I should have thought myself a very clever physician indeed!"

Source: God and your sins.