Ethical Assumptions of Clinical Pastoral Education

Abstract

Within the past half century, thousands of American clergy have completed a program of professional training known as "clinical pastoral education," a long-term supervised engagement with men and women in crisis in hospitals, prisons, and social agencies. The movement has profoundly shaped the development of pastoral counseling in America and it forms the background of current debates about counseling and moral guidance. In fact, the new ethical questions represent a return to the early agenda of clinical pastoral education, which emerged from the moral fervor of the twentiethcentury progressive movement.I should like to argue that clinical training and the pastoral counseling traditions that it spawned bear even today the clear imprint of their origins in progressivism. The founders of clinical pastoral education were moral reformers at heart; they wanted to reshape ethical sensibility and to reform professional leadership within and sometimes without the churches. That moral purpose has endured. But they did not always share the same moral vision. Their programs and practices reflected two conflicting kinds of ethical sensibility, and two differingjudgments about what was ethically important in human nature. The early divisions within the movement were not merely clashes between strong personalities; the quarrels had a conceptual underside; they exhibited different presuppositions about ethics. I. The Turn to the InterpersonalThe innovations of clinical pastoral education culminated a long legacy of dissatisfaction among the clergy. That legacy, strangely enough, found expression within the driest genre of religious literature produced in the nineteenth century: the pastoral theology textbooks. Nineteenth-century versions of the older Puritan and Anglican textbooks on casuistry and the cure of souls, the pastoral theologies quickly degenerated into collections of cliches and simpleminded instructions to parish ministers. But toward the end of the century they also mirrored some of the changes in the churches and some of the anxieties of the clergy that stood in the distant background of clinical pastoral education.

The Shift from Character to Personality in Mainline Protestant Thought, 1935–1945

“…Three years later, a pastoral counselor of the realist theological school named Rollo May put even more emphasis on personality with The Art of Counseling, which soon became widely read. 51 His central concept was "personality," and he announced this in the first chapter, "The Source of Personality Problems." Personality denoted the "inner structure" of an individual that expressed itself externally in physical, occupational, and social ways.…”