Foundations of Pastoral Counselling

Pembroke

• Publisher: SCM Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780334055372
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Counseling

Foundations of Pastoral Counselling adopts a completely new approach to its subject, through an integration of philosophical ideas, theological thought, and psychotherapeutic psychology. The result is a rich, multi-faceted and often surprising discussion about the fundamental issues in pastoral counselling.

Part 1: Fundamental Attitudes and Skills

1. Respect for the Uniqueness of the Counsellee, or Resisting the Totalizing Tendency

An essential aspect of learning the art of counselling is gaining mastery of basic skills such as deep listening, empathic relating, the use of questions, problem-solving interventions and confrontation. Naturally enough, these skills will be covered in the chapters that follow. Beyond gaining facility with the basic techniques, there is also the challenge of learning to use some of the more advanced techniques associated with the various psychotherapies. In particular, facility with Rogers’s person-centred approach provides the basic building blocks for effective counselling. Other commonly utilized methods are drawn from schools such as Gestalt therapy, transactional analysis, cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT), narrative therapy and existentialist psychotherapies.

It is beneficial for the counsellor to make judicious use of one or more of these therapies. They offer a variety of useful interventions that in many cases prove efficacious in facilitating healing and growth. However, it is also important for counsellors to be aware of a potential negativity associated with counselling and psychotherapeutic systems. It is what the Lithuanian-born Frenchman and Jew Emmanuel Levinas (1906–95) referred to as the ‘totalizing’ impulse. He believed that throughout the history of Western philosophy, from Plato to Heidegger, the same serious mistake is repeated. That error is that philosophers fail to recognize the imperialist tendency in their systems. They are unaware of the way in which they colonize the ‘other’ with the themes and categories of their philosophical systems. Levinas describes totalization as a process involving the Other being taken over by the ‘same’ (the ego, the self, consciousness), and counsellors need to pay very careful attention to his insights and warning. Counsellees can be robbed of their autonomy, freedom and individuality by counsellors who insist on fitting counsellees’ experiences of self, others and the world into the tightly prescribed categories dictated by the particular psychotherapeutic systems that counsellors are wedded to. In order to illustrate this pitfall and how it can be avoided, the illuminating and fascinating case of Anäis Nin is given here.

To help us gain a firm grasp of exactly what the tendency to totalizing is all about, a summary of Levinas’s depiction of the relation between totality and infinity is outlined below. We will see that the central conviction that Levinas holds to is the ethical demand for affirmation of absolute alterity: Others need to be confirmed in their infinite otherness. To a theologian, the way Levinas frames the conversation sounds a lot like the general approach of Kierkegaard and Barth.17 The early Barth was inspired by Kierkegaard’s affirmation of the infinite qualitative distinction between time and eternity. Barth’s critique of nineteenth-century liberal Protestant theology was that it had lost sight of this fact, and he set about re-establishing the deity of God as the One who is wholly other. Later he would revise this formulation by accenting the humanity of God. The human face of God is revealed in God’s choice of togetherness with humankind in and through Christ. Therefore the question can be posed: If Barth finally recognized that it is wrong to view God and humankind as completely isolated from each other, is it reasonable to expect that a similar move would provide Levinas’s extreme formulation of alterity in human relations with much needed nuancing? After all, the difference between God and humankind is massively larger than anything that might exist between two human beings. Though smoothing off the hard edge in Levinas’s extreme language may seem a reasonable move, we will see that maintaining the absolute distinction between the I and the Other is essential to Levinasian ethics.

While there is this clear difference between the functioning of the God–human and the I–Other relations, there is also a strong point of connection. The partnership or covenant between God and humankind is grounded in reciprocity. That is, God has a moral claim on humankind, but humans for their part can legitimately make their claim on God. Similarly, Levinas contends that all humans both assume moral responsibility for others and lodge their own claims.

Having briefly introduced Levinas’s notion of absolute alterity, we now turn to the task of developing it more fully. As indicated above, the terms ‘totality’ and ‘infinity’ play a central role in his discourse.

Levinas’s conception of the totality–infinity relation

Emmanuel Levinas is a particularly difficult thinker. His philosophical reflections are unconventional and written in a dense and cryptic style. It is often not possible for even the experienced student of Levinas to be sure exactly what he is trying to communicate in a particular section of this work. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that the secondary literature is really a collection of variant readings of the various Levinasian texts. We are helped considerably in our descriptive work by the fact that we do not need to attempt a summary of his whole corpus. Rather, we can achieve our purposes through concentrating on just two sets of related concepts: (i) totality and infinity, and (ii) the Same and the Other.

A good place to begin any discussion of Levinas’s thinking is with his central thesis. The proposition that shapes all of his philosophical work is that ethics is first philosophy, where ethics is understood as the claim that the Other makes on me to take infinite responsibility for his or her well-being. With reference to the second of his great books, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (the first is Totality and Infinity), Levinas has this to say: ‘In this book I speak of responsibility as the essential, primary and fundamental structure of subjectivity. For I describe subjectivity in ethical terms. Ethics, here, does not supplement a preceding existential base; the very node of the subjective is knotted in ethics understood as responsibility.’18

The central task that Levinas concerns himself with is describing a relation with the other person in terms other than comprehension. The phrase that captures this stance of total openness to the uniqueness and individuality of the other person, this refusal to understand or comprehend that individual through my categories, is recognition of absolute alterity. According to Levinas, it is in the face-to-face relation that the I encounters the infinite otherness of the Thou. Here we have just referred to two terms that need explication in order to fully appreciate what Levinas has in mind − namely, ‘comprehension’ and ‘the face’. It is to this task of elucidation that we now turn.

Levinas’s critique of the whole of Western philosophy from Plato to Heidegger is that the Other is reduced to that which can be expressed through thematization. The infinity of the Other is shrunk down to the ideas and categories assigned to it by the I (what Levinas also calls ‘the Same’, as we shall see below). The thought of Heidegger is a particular focus in the work of Levinas. He praises Heidegger for transcending intellectualism in the fundamental ontology that he developed so majestically in Being and Time, but he also criticizes him for his reduction of the Other through employment of his category of anonymous Being. That is to say, according to Levinas, Heidegger offers an advance beyond construing ontology as a contemplative theoretical activity (as Aristotle did), but his failing is that he nevertheless remains locked in the obsession of Western philosophy with colonizing the Other with this or that favoured theme. In his 1951 essay ‘Is Ontology Fundamental?’19 Levinas sets out to show that this is the case. In this essay, he outlines his task most succinctly: ‘The pages that follow will attempt to characterize in a very general way this relation [to the Other] which is irreducible to comprehension, even to that comprehension beyond classical intellectualism described by Heidegger.’20

In Being and Time, Heidegger addresses a very fundamental question: What does ‘to exist’ mean? That is, he is interested in investigating the question of the meaning of Being. Most translators capitalize the word ‘Being’ (Sein) to mark a crucial distinction that Heidegger makes − namely, between Being and beings (i.e. entities such as rocks, trees, insects, animals and humans). Being is the being of this or that entity; it should not be interpreted as a kind of ultimate being. In order to help him answer the question of the meaning of Being, Heidegger introduces the idea of Dasein (Da = there and Sein = being, so the term literally means there-being). Dasein can be construed as the human being, as long as in using this term one does not think of it as ‘the person’ or as ‘the biological human being’. Dasein is Heidegger’s term ...