Anton Boisen

Anton Theophilus Boisen (29 October 1876 – 1 October 1965) was an American chaplain. He was a leading figure in the hospital chaplaincy and clinical pastoral education movements.

History Born in Bloomington, Indiana, Boisen was the son of Hermann Balthsar Boisen and Elisabeth Louisa (Louise) Wylie. Both his father and his maternal grandfather, Theophilus Adam Wylie from whom his middle name stemmed, were professors at Indiana University. When his father died in 1884, his family moved into Theophilus Wylie's home.

Boisen graduated from Indiana University in 1897 and taught French and German, first in high school then later as a tutor at the university. During this period he had the first of several major psychotic episodes he would experience. Recovering from it, Boisen went on to study forestry and graduate from the Yale University School of Forestry in 1905. He went on to work for the U.S. Forest Service for several years before having a second psychotic episode.

He entered the Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York and graduated in 1911. Boisen moved from the Presbyterian to the Congregational Church, and worked for the next ten years in rural church survey work, in pastorates in both Kansas and Maine. For two years during World War I, Boisen worked with the YMCA in Europe. In 1917, Boisen returned from Europe and experienced another breakdown, but recovered to accept an offer to join the Interchurch World Movement. As part of that work, he moved to North Dakota to conduct a rural survey.

When the Interchurch World Movement collapsed in 1920, Boisen again fell victim to psychosis, and his family had him hospitalized at Westborough State Hospital, where it took him fifteen months to recover. While at Westboro, Boisen experienced a religious calling to work to bring religion and medicine closer together.

After his release, Boisen began studies in the psychology of religion at Andover Theological Seminary where he remained from 1922 to 1924 working especially with the physician and ethicist Richard Cabot. In 1924 William Bryan of the Worcester State Hospital invited Boisen to become a hospital chaplain, and the following year he began a program at the hospital for the clinical training of theological students.

Published works In 1936 he published his ideas about religion and mental health in Exploration of the Inner World, which he dedicated to Batchelder. The book was praised by the New York Times Review of Books as being a "significant contribution to the religious literature field." Boisen continued to expound his religious views in additional articles and books, notably Religion in Crisis and Custom (1955) and Out of the Depths (1960), his autobiography.