He was tall, handsome and strong, a kind-hearted man, overloaded with his work, but constantly providing his friends, acquaintances and those who asked him, medical care, and where he considered it necessary, material care. His personal life was always full of various complications, and then he withdrew into himself. In his youth, in 19241930, he was one of the participants and organizers of a Christian student circle; he was arrested, he was in prison, later he was repeatedly summoned to the Lubyanka and all his life he was under the secret supervision of the authorities.

I don't know what depressed Dmitry. But he needed an urgent meeting with a good priest, and he knew that I was systematically going to see Fr. Arseny, who was released from the camp in 1958. On one of my trips, I asked permission to come with Dmitry to Fr. Arseny.

I don't know what they were talking about, but Mitya and I could not leave on the same day, the train was only at 2 p.m. the next day, so we had to stay. Given the complexity of Mitya's diet, Nadezhda Petrovna prepared something pureed for him. In the evening, Fr. Arseny talked with Dmitry for more than three hours, and in the morning all those who came confessed and took communion. At 2 p.m. we left for Moscow, there were few people in the car, only Mitya and I were traveling in a four-berth compartment.

When we drove to Fr. Arseny, Mitya was in a depressed state, but he returned different, enlightened, joyful, full of energy. Almost all the way we talked, mostly him. I knew Mitya, I knew his last wife, I knew him all his life, but when we were driving, he seemed to be trying to expose himself to me, to show the negativity of his actions, to say that he had been married more than once; and he told it not to me, but to himself, as if conducting a psychoanalysis, and I was a silent listener; Perhaps he simply forgot about my presence.

I am infinitely glad, said Dmitry, that I have seen Fr. Arseny again; In my life I met with many priests, revered them, tried to follow their advice and instructions, but yesterday and today I received more than I received then. I began to tell Fr. Arseny about my domestic difficulties, about the current situation at work, mentioned several names of people who did not understand me; Fr. Arseny crossed himself, stopped and began to speak quietly. He entered my inner self, my spiritual world, and read the layers that had accumulated in me over the years. I listened and saw myself, saw the abyss of mistakes made, uncorrected and permeated my whole being. He spoke about people with whom he did not get along, called their names, showed their view of the situation, spoke on behalf of these people, as if he knew them.

Why is it difficult for all of you? Each sees only himself and does not want to take the position of the other for a single moment. He was right about everything; After a long cleansing conversation and confession, the heaviest burden of my worries was lifted, I understood what I had to do, and I returned home a different person.

You must understand, Mitya said, one might have thought that his conversation with me was the conversation of an experienced psychologist-analyst, perhaps a psychiatrist with vast experience. He did not ask me a single leading question; occasionally making the sign of the cross on himself, he revealed my entire inner world, and not only mine, but also those people with whom I had difficulties; And at the same time, it was amazing that he understood these people and knew them without ever seeing or hearing about them.

Of course, Fr. Arseny was not an experienced psychologist, psychoanalyst, or psychiatrist, but he simply had an all-encompassing love for man, combined with love for God, a great spiritual experience, and the gift given by the Lord to penetrate into the human soul with a clairvoyant eye. I was a professor, a doctor of medicine, a psychiatrist who had taken thousands of sick and healthy people, with vast experience, who had written dozens of scientific papers on psychiatry, and I was in front of him as a student who was just beginning to study a given course. If I, a psychiatrist, knew the psyche and spiritual world of a patient like Fr. Arseny, then I think most of my patients would have recovered long ago. But in order to become a person like Fr. Arseny, one needs constant prayer directed to God, and an all-consuming love for man; The union of these two principles creates an ascetic, a man of prayer, an elder.

Twice more we came with Dmitry to Fr. Arseny, and later he came without me. On my second visit, an extremely interesting conversation took place, which I recorded on my return to Moscow.

We arrived, there were already several people from Moscow, Voronezh and Vladimir in the house. We sat in the dining-room in the evening; Antonina Sergeevna, knowing that Dmitry Evgenievich was a psychiatrist, asked a question: Tell me, did the Lord heal the possessed, were they mentally ill?

Dmitry answered: A person can suffer from mental illness, but he can suffer from a spiritual illness, these are completely different diseases. People who are sick with spiritual illnesses are possessed; They are obsessed with a thirst for murder, an irresistible desire to do evil, to torture, to torture, to insult, their entire spiritual essence is saturated with evil, they can worship evil to demonic forces. Remember the two demoniac who lived in the tombs (Matt. 8:23), their possession. Remember the NKVD investigators who conducted interrogations with the use of horrific tortures, abuse of interrogators, their mockery of women that surpassed their understanding of humanity. These investigators were seriously spiritually ill, the forces of evil demonism seized their souls, but many of them did not suffer from mental illness at all, I met such spiritually seriously ill people more than once. Psychiatry cannot treat these people, it is an obsession.

Deliverance from spiritual illness can be accomplished by God's mercy only by a spiritual ascetic, completely immersed in prayer, love for God, for people, and not every pastor can cure such a sick person, which is confirmed by the words of our Lord Jesus Christ: This kind cannot come out except from prayer and fasting. (Mark 9:29).

Mental illnesses can be treated in psychiatric hospitals and at home with medications, physiotherapy, labor, and psychoanalysis. Many priests consider psychoanalysis sinful, asserting that the psychoanalyst forcibly invades the soul of a person, replacing confession, because only in confession can one reveal the innermost, but I, a psychiatrist, have seen more than once that the treatment carried out by an experienced psychoanalyst completely restored the sick. It happens that a person is simultaneously sick with spiritual and mental illness. It is extremely difficult to treat such patients, in my practice there have been no cures. In addition, seeing a spiritual illness, a modern doctor will not distinguish it from a mental one, and if he does, he cannot say: Go to the priest. It is necessary to note something else: a person who suffers from the spiritual illness of demonism will never want to be healed by a priest.

Those who were mentally ill at certain moments in their lives created works of genius (Vrubel, Garshin, etc.) or, coming to the Church, became deeply religious people, recovered, they were helped by spiritual guidance, prayer and the Orthodox spirit of the Church itself. At various times, the spiritual leaders of many communities sent their spiritual children to me for consultation or treatment, and many of them later became wonderful priests, monks, nuns, and artists. The disease was overcome by faith in God.