Abstract
This article suggests that pastoral counselors in the field must vigorously engage in the process of self-interpretation to colleagues in allied professions. It accordingly attempts to offer a bilateral approach to such interdisciplinary communication. Part One focuses on the psychology of id, superego and ego as an exegetical principle to describe recent trends in the field. Part Two offers a complementary theological account of pastoral counseling, seen “from the inside,” focusing on the image of the pastoral counselor as theviator or fellow pilgrim along the way.
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Reference Notes
E. Mansell Pattison, “Psychiatry and Religion Circa 1978: Analysis of a Decade, Part I,”Pastoral Psychology, vol. 27, no. 1 (Fall 1978), pp. 8–25;idem, Part II,ibid., vol. 27, no. 2 (Winter 1978), pp. 119–141; the quotation is from p. 120.
See John T. McNeill,A History of the Cure of Souls (New York: Harper and Row, 1951).
The literature on pastoral counseling is enormous. The following are representative studies: Donald Capps,Pastoral Care: A Thematic Approach (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1979); Howard J. Clinebell, Jr.,Basic Types of Pastoral Counseling Nashville: Abingdon, 1966); Seward Hiltner,Preface to Pastoral Theology (Nashville: Abingdon, 1958); James N. Lapsley,Salvation and Health: the Interlocking Processes of Life (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1972); Thomas C. Oden,Kerygma and Counseling: Towards a Covenant Ontology for Secular Psychotherapy (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1966); Edward Thornton,Theology and Pastoral Counseling (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice Hall, 1964); Edward Thurneysen,A Theology of Pastoral Care, tr. Jack A. Worthington and Thomas Wieser (Richmond: John Knox Press, 1962); Daniel Day Williams,The Minister and the Care of Souls (New York: Harper, 1961).
See Roger Johnson, ed.,Critical Issues in Modern Religion (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice Hall, 1973).
See Thomas C. Oden,The Intensive Group Experience: the New Pietism (Philadelphia: Westminister, 1972) generally, and Clinebell,op. cit., pp. 300ffet passim on the importance of supervision.
See Oden,Kerygma and Counseling; also, Don Browning,Atonement and Psychotherapy (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1966).
See Thomas C. Oden, “Recovering Lost Identity,”The Journal of Pastoral Care, vol. 34, no. 1 (March 1980), pp. 4–19; Don Browning,The Moral Context of Pastoral Care (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1976);et idem, “Images of Man in Contemporary Models of Pastoral Care,”Interpretation, vol. 33, no. 2 (April 1979), pp. 144–156; Donald Capps,op. cit.
Paul Tillich,The Courage to Be (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948).
Ernest Becker,The Denial of Death (New York: Free Press, 1973). See Robert Sorenson, “The Resurrection and Pastoral Care: Some Theological and Psychological Issues,”dialog, vol. 19, no. 1 (Winter 1980), pp. 11–16.
Browning, “Images of Man....,”op. cit., p. 149.
Ibid., p. 151.
See, for example, Rosemary Radford Ruether,New Woman/NewEarth: Sexist Ideologies and Human Liberation (New York: Seabury, 1975), especially chap. 6: “The Psychiatric Revolution: Friend or Enemy of Women?”
For an analysis of the background of this trend, see Johnson,op. cit., chapters 8–10, on Freud, Bonhoeffer, and Erikson, respectively. See also C. Roy Woodruff, “Toward a Theology of Maturity in Pastoral Care,”Pastoral Psychology, vol. 27, no. 1 (Fall 1978), pp. 26–38.
This list is suggested by Paul W. Pruyser; it is cited and discussed by Capps,op. cit., chap. 4.
On the question of the relationship between health and salvation, see Lapsley,op. cit. More generally, for a discussion of overall cultural trends, see my essay, “The Birthing of Post-Modern Religion,” in Johnson,op. cit., pp. 435–459.
I think that this image is more adequate, given its dynamic, historical resonances, than the one I struggled to articulate some years ago: the minister as one who “bears witness” to the self-giving love of God (agape). Still, I remain convinced that that is a fundamental image for pastoral counseling, and would incorporate it more extensively here, if space permitted. See H. Paul Santmire, “The Minister's Therapeutic Role in the Field of Mental Health,”Lutheran Quarterly, II, 3 (August 1960), pp. 195–204.
For one description of the theological basis of the Christian, specifically the Protestant, ministry, see H. Paul Santmire, “An Introduction to the Doctrine of the Ministry,”Lutheran Quarterly, vol. 16, no. 3 (August 1964), pp. 195–210.
Some, such as William Rogers, “Leadership of the Church in Pastoral Care,”Chicago Theological Seminary Register, vol. 70, no. 20 (Spring 1980), pp. 49f. and Oden, “Recovering Lost Identity,” p. 4, highlight the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation as a model for the pastoral counselor who wishes to identify fully with the counselee. While this has an obvious theological appropriateness, the selfgiving and the identification of God with humanity in the person of Christ, as the Church understands that motif, so far transcends in magnitude that of a single sinful minister seeking to engage himself or herself with another, while he or she also—properly—attempts to keep some distance between the two, as well, that it does not seem really accessible as a model. So I prefer the more horizontal model of friendship, highlighted by the Gospel of John as the mode of interaction between Jesus and his disciples.
On the theme of vocation, and for other suggestive biblical insights, see Walter Brueggemann, “Covenanting as Human Vocation: A Discussion of the Relation of Bible and Pastoral Care,”Interpretation, vol. 33, no. 2 (April 1979), pp. 115–129.
This sketch of pastoral counseling, it should be noted, seen both externally (Part I) and from within (Part II), focuses on what in my view is the “mainstream,” as far as developments in the field are concerned. Other interpreters will see things differently. For the sake of completeness, then, I want to point to two other trends, to the right and to the left of what in my judgment is the mainstream. On the one hand, we can notice a revival of interest on the theological right in a more directive, more prescriptive, even authoritarian kind of “counseling,” often focusing on issues of personal morality and sometimes predicated on the notion that there is no such thing as an unconscious, that that phenomenon, in fact, is the voice of Satan. On the other hand, we can see the continued existence of a group of practitioners, on the theological left, who see themselves primarily as psychotherapists, as professional counselors who just happen to be working, as it were, in a religious context (see, for example, Ronald R. Lee,Clergy and Clients: The Practice of Pastoral Psychotherapy [New York: Seabury, 1980]). The mainstream, in contrast, as I have tried to indicate, is both open to a variety of post-Freudian and other socio-cultural influences and attentive, as well, to the concrete religious identity of the counselor and the constitutive importance of religious symbols and religious communities generally in the practice of pastoral counseling.
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Chaplain and Lecturer in Religion at Wellesley College for thirteen years
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Santmire, H.P. “We really need to know what pastoral counseling Is”—Reflections for colleagues in other disciplines. Pastoral Psychol 29, 244–253 (1981). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01771344
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01771344