There would have been no contested boundaries between Catholicism and psychology if there had not had been places – physical locations and social institutions alike – where the lines could be drawn, divisions of labor proposed, social groups formed, and authorities created. In this chapter, we turn to some of these places. Primary institutions were psychology departments at Catholic colleges and universities, because they educated the cadre of psychologists who later created other institutions and staffed the – eventually – growing number of psychology departments, child guidance clinics, and other centers of applied psychology in the Catholic community. So we look briefly at the founding of psychology departments at Catholic universities in the early years of the twentieth century. Then, we turn to three organizations of Catholics in psychology: the Chicago Society of Catholic Psychologists, the American Catholic Psychological Association (ACPA), and the Guild of Catholic Psychiatrists (not psychologists, strictly speaking, but in the psychological field nonetheless). The focus will be primarily on the ACPA, as that was the group that made the biggest impact on the Catholic community during the years of its existence, 1948–70.

These institutional responses to psychology presupposed an attunement to the new discipline's usefulness in addressing difficulties, especially in education. In the early years of the twentieth century, there was not only a push from Catholic psychologists to incorporate the discipline into the community; there was a pull from others in the community to bring it in.