Whether troubled people take their problems to the clergy or to mental health professionals is strictly a cultural accident. Whether the clergy pass them on to mental health professionals, or whether the mental health professionals pass them back to the clergy is often also a cultural accident, albeit of a different order. As the very existence of the American Association of Pastoral Counselors demonstrates, many clergy have taken these cultural facts seriously. What it perhaps comes down to is that the care of souls is the care of souls, and the more vocabularies and symbol systems one has at one's disposal, the more effective one is likely to be in exercising that care. It is not, after all, as though the counseling of troubled people or the guidance of those involved in personal growth were a new human enterprise, springing full grown, as it were, from the head of Freud. On the contrary. This really is the oldest profession, and every culture has had its shamans, confessors, gurus, spiritual directors, magicians, and many other varieties of wise men and women, dedicated, with varying degrees of expertise and effectiveness, to carrying out just these tasks. It is only in the last century that the bifurcation of this ancient profession into a religious and a secular branch has taken place. For several generations, there has been little or no communication between these two branches, and each has had a tendency to view the other with suspicion if not outright hostility.For the first sixty or seventy years of the psychoanalytic era enormous stress was laid on the need to study the functioning of the psyche without having the process of observation obscured by moral or ethical presuppositions. At the dawn of the psychoanalytic enterprise, moral and ethical categories predominated in the description and assessment of human behavior. In order to provide both intellectual and emotional space for the delicate and difficult process of developing a scientific approach to the psyche, it was essential to set these categories aside.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.