Anna Terruwe died on 28 June 1988, leaving behind a controversial but influential body of work in Catholic psychiatry that emphasized the goodness of human emotion.
Anna Terruwe died on 28 June 1988, at the age of 76. Her death closed a career of more than five decades in which she had developed and defended a distinctive psychiatric-theological theory, later dubbed Terruwe-Baars theory or the theory of emotional repression, which held that many neuroses stemmed not from moral failings but from the unnatural suppression of legitimate emotional life, often reinforced by rigid or scrupulous Catholic moral formation.
Throughout her career she had faced official censure: in 1956 the Holy Office (the Vatican's doctrinal watchdog, later renamed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith) issued a formal condemnation of aspects of her psychological theories as being in tension with Thomistic moral theology, a serious professional and personal blow for a devout Catholic physician. Despite this, she continued to practice, write, and teach, eventually finding vindication as her ideas gained wider acceptance within pastoral counseling and Catholic psychology circles, particularly through her collaboration with Dutch-American psychiatrist Conrad Baars.
Her death was mourned within Dutch psychiatric and Catholic intellectual communities as the loss of a tenacious, original thinker who had insisted—against considerable institutional resistance—that the Catholic moral tradition and modern psychiatric science could be reconciled without either doing violence to the other. Her work continued to influence pastoral psychology and Catholic-informed psychotherapy long after her death, notably through the Baars-Terruwe Institute in the United States.