Spiritual Direction and Psychotherapy

Abstract

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.

Spirituality, Religion, and Counseling: Dimensions and Relationships

“…Although spirituality has been noted by some authors to be a vital aspect of the counselor-client relationship and of human development (Fowler, 1981;Westerhoff, 1976), generally spirituality has been slighted in therapeutic literature (Barnhouse, 1979;Torrey, 1986). When the spiritual component of the helping relationship is discussed, it is often in the context of a particular religious worldview (Banks, 1980;Canda, 1988).…”

Religion, Guilt, and Mental Health

“…R eligion (and spirituality in general) is consistently reported as integral to American's lives (Gallup, 1995;Gallup & Castelli, 1989;Kosmin & Lachman, 1993). Despite this, counselors often leave religion out of the counseling process (Barnhouse, 1979;Ingersoll, 1994;Kelly, 1995;Miller, 1999). Although the construct of spirituality is being referred to more frequently in relation to counseling, religion is less often referred to (Lovinger, 1990) despite most Americans still reporting religious affiliations (Hoge, 1996).…”

Religiosity, Ethnicity, and Mental Health: Interface the 80s

“…Religion's potential role in the overall well-being of individuals has become an area of increased importance to individuals and professionals alike. With the advent of the Holistic Health Movement, mental health professionals have begun to reconcile many of the differences that have long separated the fields of psychiatry and religion (Barnhouse, 1979(Barnhouse, , 1979Bartemeier, 1965;Duhrssen, 1978;Koteskey, 1979;MacLean, 1959;Power, 1979;Zilboorg, 1962). Pattison (1978a) reports on changes that have occurred within organized religious institutions to accommodate a growing awareness (among clerics and devoted lay mental health professionals) of the need for a deeper liaison commitment between the fields of psychiatry and religion, and between service providers from each field.…”