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Hymns Ancient & Modern - Neil Pembroke

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153 pages

English

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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.

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Publié par	Hymns Ancient & Modern
Date de parution	12 mai 2017
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9780334055372
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0049€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Foundations of Pastoral Counselling
Integrating Philosophy, Theology and Psychotherapy
Neil Pembroke

© Neil Pembroke 2017
Published in 2017 by SCM Press
Editorial office
3rd Floor, Invicta House,
108–114 Golden Lane,
London EC1Y 0TG, UK
SCM Press is an imprint of Hymns Ancient & Modern Ltd
(a registered charity)

Hymns Ancient & Modern ® is a registered trademark of Hymns Ancient and Modern Ltd
13A Hellesdon Park Road, Norwich,
Norfolk NR6 5DR, UK
www.scmpress.co.uk
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, SCM Press.
The Author has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the Author of this Work
British Library Cataloguing in Publication data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
978 0 334 05535 8
Typeset by Regent Typesetting
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon

Contents
Foreword
Introduction
Part 1: Fundamental Attitudes and Skills
1. Respect for the Uniqueness of the Counsellee, or Resisting the Totalizing Tendency
2. Empathy and the Body, or the Quest for Participatory Sense-Making
3. Deep Listening, or Being Formed in the Discipline of Attention
4. Conditions for Genuine Dialogue, or It’s the Relationship that Heals
Part 2: Fundamental Interventions and Strategies
5. ‘Relational Humanness’ and ‘Relational Justice’, or Caring for Two Worlds
6. Revising Faulty Thinking, or a Socratic Approach to Healing ‘Belief-Sickness’
7. Facilitating Self-Challenge, or Learning the Art of Indirection
8. Working with Counsellee Images, or Exploring the ‘Metaphors We Live By’
9. Connecting with a Community of Hope, or Pastoral Rituals that Shine a Light

Concluding Reflection: It’s Also about Personal Spirituality
Bibliography

Foreword
Well-digested, enduring and practical insight and wisdom are in short supply in the contemporary world, even in the spheres of pastoral and practical theology. There is a tendency for contributions to be either enormously practical, but light on theory, or theoretically sophisticated, but deficient in practical applicability.
In this context, Foundations of Pastoral Counselling is a welcome, important and mature contribution from one of Australia’s leading and most prolific pastoral theologians. Neil Pembroke manages both to draw insightfully on his extensive experience of pastoral care and counselling and to bring this into critical dialogue with sophisticated philosophical and theological theories, lightly but clearly presented on their own terms. The book is an education in complex theories, used with great effect to illuminate everyday practice and experience. Readers cannot but go away from this volume with a renewed sense of the value of pastoral practice and the importance of philosophical and other theories as a real source of insight and stimulus for developing their approaches and skills. I hope it will be read by experienced pastoral and non-religious counsellors as well as by students of ministry and pastoral care in training. I have no doubt that the range of thinkers and ideas it covers will assist the latter in their wider theological and philosophical studies, as well as in becoming more pastorally aware and responsive.
One of the real strengths of this book is the love and deep understanding the author has for his practice and for the thinkers, ancient and modern, that he draws on. It is this love or desire (as Simone Weil, one of Pembroke’s interlocutors, would say) that communicates itself in his beautifully clear expositions of complex thought. If you have heard of Levinas, Buber and Kierkegaard, but have been bemused or defeated by the complexity and incorrigibility of their writings, or been fobbed off with tokenistic inclusion of key ideas in practical text books (‘I-Thou’ as a basis of all kinds of relating), then here you will find clear, critical and sympathetic expositions of their thinking. This from an author who has clearly immersed himself in their texts so that he can explain and interpret their thrust and significance for counselling practice ‘in his own words’. Quite apart from the application of their thought to pastoral counselling, readers will acquire a substantial education in important aspects of philosophy and theology.
The expository clarity Pembroke applies to philosophical thinkers is also typical of the range of psychotherapeutic and counselling theorists whose work he uses. Heinz Kohut’s work, for example, is as complex and difficult to grasp as it is significant. Pembroke, nothing daunted, retrieves insights that are immediately applicable in pastoral counselling dealing with issues of shame and self-worth. So here again there is wider gain for readers.
A particularly important aspect of the book is that it also finds space for critical and creative insights from the theological tradition, often neglected as a source of wisdom even within pastoral counselling. For Pembroke, the word ‘pastoral’ means something distinctive and important in the quest for helping individuals to flourish in all aspects of their lives. So he does not hesitate to draw on the Bible, on theologians like Aquinas and Karl Barth, and on spiritual writers such as Thomas Merton and Henri Nouwen. This allows him to find space for discussions on, for example, the empathic or passionate nature of God amid wider conversations on issues arising in pastoral counselling.
A further strength of this work is that it is full of wise and insightful comments and illustrations from the author’s own experience, as well as from the work of other therapists. A particularly rich discussion illustrating this is in the chapter about facilitating self-change indirectly using the inspiration of Kierkegaard’s philosophical positions. But throughout the book, there is constant earthing of theory in practice. Even particular phrases stick in the mind, like the idea that the counsellor must manage the ‘empathic dance’.
Pembroke’s clearly written chapters typically start with a particular fundamental framing, or substantive issue in pastoral counselling, and then go on to identify and expound theoretical and philosophical resources that illuminate it, moving then towards the application of these ideas. This measured and clear pattern allows readers to cover a lot of ground with ease, if not without effort. While this may look at first sight like the application of theory to practice, it is clear that this is just a way of structuring a mutual learning conversation between different perspectives on pastoral counselling. This conversation is invariably enriching.
This book will not tell you how to become a pastoral counsellor or provide you with basic technical information and skills. It is likely that some of the issues and thinkers addressed in it will not be of the same level of interest for all readers. My advice would be to start where you find something of interest and read outwards from there. I am pretty sure that you will not only want to read all the remaining chapters, but will also want to follow up the references and thinkers to whom Pembroke points and whose work has inspired his own thought. The book will not yield up its riches without some work on the part of its readers, but if you follow the author where he gently leads, you will find that your practice and thought will be much enriched. You will acquire critical horizons and resources that will sustain and stimulate you for a long time to come.
Pastoral counselling, once central in practical theology and ministry, has tended to become rather peripheral to these disciplines in recent years, particularly outside the USA. It is really good to see a major, critical, interdisciplinary contribution to this field that is intellectually challenging, rigorous and practically insightful. I salute its author for all the work that has gone into thinking through and writing a book that is unique in its scope and depth and will have enduring value. I commend it to what I hope will be a very large readership over time.
Stephen Pattison
University of Birmingham, UK

Introduction
There are specialist pastoral counsellors and there are those who counsel as part of general pastoral ministry. This book brings together both categories in addressesing foundational issues of pastoral counselling. The intended readership is primarily those beginning their exploration of the complicated and delicate art of counselling, but experienced pastors, chaplains and counsellors may also find insights and methods that are fresh and add value to their established ministries.
The aim is to offer a concise treatment of the foundations of pastoral counselling, which means there are some significant issues that the book is unable to cover. Having said that, the issues selected for treatment are to my mind the absolutely central ones: the nature and scope of pastoral counselling respect for the freedom and individuality of the counsellee attentive listening and empathy embodiment and the counselling relationship the authenticity of the counsellor inclusion in the inner world of experience of the counsellee confirmation of counsellees in their God-given potential guided discovery i