Shared Wisdom: Use of the Self in Pastoral Care and Counseling

by Pamela Cooper-White

Understanding one's personal issues and emotional reactions one's "countertransference" has long been recognized as a core competency in ministry. Now new understandings of intersubjectivity, mutual influence, shared wisdom (both conscious and unconscious), and multicultural dynamics in the caring relationship are bringing promising new possibilities and challenges to pastoral practice. Employing these insights, in this groundbreaking book Pamela Cooper-White offers a new relational paradigm for pastoral assessment and theological reflection. She uses the caregiver's own responses and feelings as a primary instrument for deepening discernment and better care. She innovatively combines postmodern, psychoanalytic, and theological perspectives with illuminating case studies to illustrate this new use of the self in pastoral care, counseling, and psychotherapy.

Genres: Counselling, Spirituality, Nonfiction

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Pamela Cooper-White began her education as an art and music major at Boston University, graduating with a Bachelor of Music degree Magna cum Laude. She went on to earn both a PhD at Harvard University in historical musicology with a dissertation on Arnold Schoenberg’s opera Moses und Aron, and a Master of Divinity with Honors at Harvard Divinity School. Music was a bridge to ministry—she discerned a call to ordained ministry while serving as a church music director. During her MDiv program, inspired by the Catholic Worker movement, she founded and directed a ministry for men and women living on the streets in Salem, MA, and first became involved in working with battered women and their children. While seeking her first call to ministry, she taught musicology from 1982-1983 at UCLA and served as a shelter and hotline volunteer at Sojourn Services for Battered Women in Santa Monica, CA. In 1994 she was ordained to the ministry in the United Church of Christ and was called as Director of San Francisco Partnership Ministry—a coalition of 6 urban churches—overseeing a multi-service agency for Southeast Asian refugees and leading a ministry of accompaniment for Salvadoran pastors who had received death threats.

Reviews

[Michale · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful work discussing potential pitfalls of the appropriate "use of self" in pastoral work. She describes the "shifting paradigms" of pastoral care in regard to subjects such as repression, the unconscious, counter-transference, and narcissism in a way that someone like me, who is not as familiar with these concepts as a trained therapist would be, can nonetheless understand. Her discussion of a "postmodern inter-subjectivity" evokes the complexity of what we bring to our encounters with others, and she offers helpful practical suggestions for grounding one's self in order to review these encounters and turn past mistakes into future opportunities. Her clear writing is never impersonal, and although she largely grounds her ethics of empathy in Christian scripture, substitutions from the Hebrew Bible and Jewish teachings that mirrored her ideas immediately popped into my mind, and I often felt as if she were articulating my own, very Jewish, principles. Maybe I'm also just getting better at reading this type of work.

[Jackson Brooks · Rating 3 out of 5]

Definitely an interesting book. She makes some good points and applies relational philosophy to counselling. That being said, some of the explicitly theological theories found within are a bit sketchy. And her description of counseling itself seems rather secular, even though she wrote from a religious standpoint. In addition, I am not sure that she actually proved her thesis: that the psychoanalytical theory of transference is (sometimes) actually beneficial for both counselor and counselee. She gave far more negative examples of transference than positive ones, and the positive contributions she did make do not seem entirely different from classical Christian counseling. Still, it was food for thought.

[Kye Flannery · Rating 4 out of 5]

Useful, kind, honest, informed, nourishing, rad.

[Mang · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5....

[Kira Austin-Young · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a very informative book on transference and counter-transference in pastoral care and counseling. Her case studies are useful and well thought-out. It was more academic in tone than I anticipated, particularly the first several chapters, and it was a bit difficult to follow along, even though those chapters did include one of the finest, clearest, and most succinct descriptions of modernism and post-modernism along with their various thinkers that I have ever read.

[Craig Dove · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good book for people working in chaplaincy or pastoral counselling, particularly about maintaining good boundaries and helping people cope with the distress they're experiencing rather than merely offering false comfort.

[Cathy Hasty · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book on pastoral care, particularly in the area of countertransference.

[Joy Kaplan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Great theory and praise behind pastoral care.