Emmanuel Movement - Later Years

Later Years

Samuel McComb left Emmanuel Church in 1916 to become dean of the Cathedral of the Incarnation in Baltimore, Maryland. He returned to the Boston area a few years later to teach at Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, then moved to France to become rector of the American Episcopal Church in Nice. Elwood Worcester had little time to devote to work with individuals while serving as rector, but continued to supervise Courtenay Baylor and other lay therapists who trained at Emmanuel. In 1931, Worcester retired from Emmanuel Church. Courtenay Baylor arranged for the use of a house in Boston, and the two incorporated as the Craigie Foundation in order to continue their counseling work.

Body, Mind and Spirit, by Elwood Worcester and Samuel McComb, was published in 1931. In the book's introduction, Worcester reflected on "the remedial ministry undertaken by my associates and by me in Emmanuel Church, Boston." They had begun in a time when the pre-Freudian methods of psychotherapeutic work dominated the field, and later incorporated, in a limited way, some of the methods of psychoanalysis. They had "prepared hundreds of patients for surgical operations . . . had been able to remove pain and to obtain natural sleep. . . I am thinking primarily, however, of alcoholism and of other drug addictions. It is well known that we have obtained as good and as permanent results in these fields as any other workers, and these results have been obtained by suggestion and by the inculcation of new and more spiritual principles."