The second column pillar of this metaphysical quadrilateral is the unrestricted defense of free will and the moral agency of the human person. The speaker denounces with clinical acuity how the two great idols of the twentieth century, Freudian psychoanalysis and strictly biological psychiatry, have conspired their forces to declare the abolition of human freedom. On the one hand, orthodox psychoanalysis chains the subject to an implacable psychic determinism, where each behavior, each anxiety and each voluntary decision is interpreted as the fatal result of unconscious drives, repressed infantile complexes and mechanical determinations of the id. On the other hand, modern neuropharmacological reductionism proclaims a similar chemical determinism, attributing all moral choice to the ebbs and flows of serotonin, dopamine, and cellular genetics. Against both deterministic tyrannies, Catholic anthropology maintains with dogmatic firmness that the human will, even though it is weakened by the wounds of original sin and strongly conditioned by the organic temperament, the passions of the sensitive appetite and the social environment, retains its essential freedom of choice intact. Without free will the moral imputability of actions completely disappears; and where there is no guilt or personal responsibility, the very notion of redemption and grace loses all meaning.

The third great ontological pillar explained in the conference is the classical concept of human nature, understood not in the superficial empirical sense of physical ecology or brute biology, but in its Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysical rigor: the very essence of an entity considered as the active principle of its own operations and intrinsically ordered towards a teleological purpose predetermined by the Creator. Dr. Verdier exposes how postmodern psychology, poisoned by philosophical nominalism and atheistic existentialism, has extirpated from its manuals the idea of ​​an immutable human nature, replacing it with radical constructivism that postulates that the human being is a blank sheet capable of arbitrarily self-design behind the created order. The denial of this third pillar constitutes the intellectual root of the contemporary aberrations that we contemplate with astonishment in today's clinic, such as gender ideology and cybernetic transhumanism. When psychiatry renounces recognizing that man has a nature with an objective and unmodifiable order, all psychopathology is stripped of its normative reference; Disorders that threaten nature are reclassified with complacent lightness as mere statistical variations in behavior or expressions of cultural diversity, preventing the doctor from diagnosing the true illness of the spirit.

The fourth and final pillar that crowns this epistemological architecture is the transcendent understanding of the human person. Following the classic definition of the philosopher Boethius assumed by Saint Thomas Aquinas—individual substance of a rational nature—the expositor establishes an uncrossable demarcation between the true concept of person and the modern caricature of the autonomous individual or the hedonistic ego. In immanentist psychology, the individual is conceived as a monad closed on itself, whose supreme good consists of egocentric self-affirmation and the maximization of its subjective psychological well-being. In the Catholic tradition, on the other hand, the person is a subsistent ontological subject, invested with a sacred and inalienable dignity for being the image and likeness of the Creator, and whose plenitude is not achieved by solitary selfishness, but in the gift of self and in communion with God and neighbor. Sacred respect for the mystery of the person prevents the psychiatric patient from being manipulated as a simple guinea pig for pharmacological experimentation or as a replaceable cog within the gears of the State's social engineering.