Transforming Wisdom

Pastoral Psychotherapy in Theological Perspective

Kelcourse, Lyon

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781498208963
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Transforming Wisdom offers an extensive, multidisciplinary introduction to pastoral psychotherapy from some of the most respected practitioners in the field. With special attention to theological perspectives on the practice of psychotherapy, this collection of essays will be useful to students seeking an orientation to the art and science of pastoral psychotherapy as well as to seasoned professionals looking to refresh and renew their practice. As the subtitle, Pastoral Psychotherapy in Theological Perspective, suggests, this book is intended to represent the field of pastoral psychotherapy as a mental-health discipline that maintains intentional dialogue with its theological roots. Even as pastoral psychotherapy has developed from the ancient notion of the cure of souls to the current search for a psychology of happiness, therapists grounded in faith communities seek a practice that is respectful of all persons, mindful of the deep wisdom that emanates from the true self, or soul. While many contributors write from a psychoanalytic or psychodynamic perspective grounded in Christian theological idioms, diverse theoretical perspectives, including Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy, Narrative Therapy, Buddhist Mindfulness, and Jungian understanding of individuation, are represented.

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Prelude: Why This Book Now?

K. Brynolf Lyon

When you want to awaken, I am that wanting.1

—Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours

Pastoral psychotherapy is an expression of the life of faith in conversation with contemporary psychotherapeutic disciplines.2 It is an effort to understand and live the faith in the midst of the concern to meliorate human emotional suffering. This book is an effort to provide a comprehensive introduction to the practices of pastoral psychotherapy so understood. While single-authored volumes have addressed important perspectives on various aspects of, or clinical approaches to, pastoral psychotherapy and handbooks have provided brief discussions of the individual issues involved, this book invites the reader to take a broad, multi-theoretical perspective on the practice of pastoral psychotherapy in the second decade of the twenty-first century.3

Pastoral psychotherapy today must be situated between two significant cultural developments. First, the landscape of modern secularity conditions the situation of pastoral psychotherapy in important ways. On the one hand, after an extended time during which the psychotherapeutic disciplines in general disparaged the life of faith, those very disciplines have rediscovered the importance of spirituality with a vengeance. What is happening is a land shift from the time of Freud’s (1927/1964) declaration that religion was a neurosis and Skinner’s (1948) claim that religion represented a mere behaviorally maintained superstition. A great number of psychologists, psychiatrists, and psychotherapists have now published books and articles on “spirituality” as essential to emotional health.4 Unfortunately, many of these books imagine that spirituality can be talked about in the abstract, apart from any particular religious tradition or community that nurtures and develops the beliefs and practices associated with that way of life. Often the argument is made that “religion” is concrete, particular, and institutional whereas “spirituality” is universal. There are profound philosophical problems with this way of divvying up the language of faith. Whatever language of spirituality is used has its origins somewhere, in some particular way of construing and living in the world in faith. To imagine that it does not is simply license to import someone else’s beliefs and core assumptions under the guise of the “universal.”

A less cynical way to see this development within the secular clinical disciplines, of course, is to notice that it is a kind of reenchantment of the world, a sleight of hand suddenly harvesting seemingly fallow ground. While the secular disciplines understand themselves to be offering objective accounts of the various expressions of spirituality, as Don Browning (1987) suggested many years ago and as Marie Hoffman (2011) has argued more recently, these accounts are always embedded within normative and larger narrative, mythic structures that give shape to the experience they intend merely to describe. This has the effect of reenchanting human experience, imbuing its newly charged spirited sensibility with the air of a nonetheless falsely claimed objective truth. The inevitably constructive character of such descriptions of spirituality most certainly does not mean the therapist has license to impose their beliefs on others. It does, however, point to the problem that there is no simple, neutral place to stand in addressing and assessing spiritual issues. Given that this is the case, one ought to be accountable somewhere. Pastoral psychotherapy attempts to recognize that accountability, calling its practitioners toward clarity regarding their theological sensibilities.

On the other hand, another side to the challenge of secularity to pastoral psychotherapy has less to do with the secular clinical disciplines and more to do with the great shifts in Western culture itself. The world in which pastoral psychotherapy must function is dramatically different from that which gave birth to the movement at the beginning of the last century. The increase in secularity itself presents us with a vastly transformed world. Many of our clients hold the increasingly widespread belief that, as the philosopher Charles Taylor (2007) has noted, they can give a perfectly fine account of their lives without reference to the religious beliefs of a historic religious community. So what is the relationship of the language of faith to the practice of therapy? What difference does our rootedness and commitment to a particular religious community mean to the therapy we practice?

The second significant cultural development facing pastoral psychotherapy in our time is the emergence of a powerful conservative Christian movement, which promotes so-called Christian counseling. While this is a very diverse group of professionals, some within this group have far less difficulty answering the questions above. Some self-described Christian counselors, for example, believe that the Scripture is the inerrant or infallible word of God, the final authority for all matters within its purview. These professionals endorse some version of what is called biblical counseling: counseling as the application of biblical principles to life’s problems. While Christian counselors also have clinical theories from which they practice, it is quite clear that for some such persons final authority resides with the Bible rather than with clinical theory or mutually critical dialogue. Or it is simply asserted, perhaps on the claim of revelation, that good clinical theory obviously could not contravene the Bible. Curiosity and exploration threaten to give way to judgment. Singularity erases multiplicity. Human experience, from this perspective, must finally fit or be formed to whatever one takes to be “the Biblical witness.”

Pastoral psychotherapy as understood in this volume takes a different position with regard to human life and the ways the resources of the faith might be helpful to struggling persons. In effect, it appeals to a different family of theological and psychological accounts of authority in general, and of authority in relation to the shaping of human life in particular. No straightforward application of religious beliefs (wherever they are derived from) is sufficient to the complexity of human life and the richness of the divine presence. Interpretations of human experience from the human sciences have their own authority that must be brought into mutually critical conversation with the claims of faith. As the reader will see in the chapters that follow, there are many different ways of allowing clinical theory and the resources of the faith to enrich one another outside of a reductionist paradigm. Part of the importance of this book, we think, is reclaiming the richness of the conversation between clinical theory and faith in the practice of psychotherapy.

To what does our profession witness in a world that is both increasingly secular and increasingly religiously polarized? Pastoral psychotherapy, in the main, affirms the importance of both particularity and plurality. It will show evidence of being firmly rooted in a distinctive theological perspective even as it embraces religious and cultural diversity. In this sense, as we conceive it, pastoral psychotherapy stands between secular appropriations of a universalizing language of spirituality on the one hand and more religiously absolutistic appropriations of certain kinds of clinical language on the other. It seeks to be faithful to the spiritual life as a critical and imaginative lived-conversation between the resources of a religious community and the languages and practices of contemporary clinical theory. It resists the uncritical imposition of p...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: Prelude: Why This Book Now?
• Chapter 2: Introduction: Pastoral Psychotherapy in North America
• Chapter 3: On Listening: Taming the Fox
• Chapter 4: Culture, Ethnicity, and Race: A Womanist Self Psychological Perspective
• Chapter 5: Sexuality-Affirming Pastoral Theology and Counseling
• Chapter 6: Personality, Individuation, Mindfulness
• Chapter 7: Assessing Faith: Beneficent vs. Toxic Spirituality
• Chapter 8: Professionalism and Ethics
• Chapter 9: The Art and Discipline of Diagnosis
• Chapter 10: Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: Coping and Meaning Making
• Chapter 11: Initial Interviews
• Chapter 12: Individuals: The Therapeutic Relationship
• Chapter 13: Sacred Ties: Helping Couples Find Faith in Love
• Chapter 14: From Systems to Narrative Family Therapy
• Chapter 15: Group Psychotherapy as Metanoetic Liturgy
• Chapter 16: Coda: Self-Care for the Least of These