Many Voices: Pastoral Psychotherapy in Relational and Theological Perspective

by Pamela Cooper-White

This book is a full scale disciplinary framework for pastoral psychotherapists/pastoral counselors at intermediate and advanced levels of clinical training and also for experienced pastoral counselors and psychotherapists in professional practice. It harvests the great potential of postmodern sensibilities to help, accompany, and support individuals, couples, and families in recognizing and healing especially painful psychic wounds, and/or longstanding patterns of self-defeating relationships to self and others. Pamela Cooper-White's widely praised work, which has always integrated cutting-edge notions from the social sciences into pastoral therapy, here takes a distinctive and promising turn toward the relational and the theological. Pastoral psychotherapy, she argues, needs to find its framework in a strongly relational idea of the person, God, and health. Illustrated throughout by four key case studies, Cooper-White shows in Part 1 how multiplicity and relationality provide a dynamic and exciting way of viewing human potential and pain. In Part 2 she unfolds the practical applications of this paradigm for a strongly empathic therapeutic relationship and process.

Genres: Spirituality, Psychology

352 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 2006

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

[Cathy Hasty · Rating 4 out of 5]

From my review for APC:

Pamela Cooper-White sets a high bar for this book: “a bridge” between the worlds of psychoanalytic theory and the concrete practice of pastoral counseling. She seeks to create an overview from a “postmodern, relational-psychoanalytic perspective within the context of a new, postmodern pastoral theology,” then put that framework into practice. Overall she does a brilliant job, particularly with the examples she uses to illuminate her ideas. She accomplishes the demanding task of developing a comprehensive framework for intermediate and advanced psychotherapists and gives good cogent reflections on many practice issues. Not for the faint of heart, the book is a challenging read, densely but clearly covering a wide diversity of disciplines and perspectives.

The strengths of this text are the complexity and diversity of the theories, which are explained with as much clarity review for APC:

The limitations are the losses of accuracy from compressing complex theories and the inevitable demands of reading a compressed summary. I have read a great deal of theory and practice in this field. I enjoyed the challenge of engaging the material. I did not see the same postmodern criticism of psychoanalytic theory, or the inclusion of some of the more recent and excellent counseling theories, such as Internal Family Systems or Systems Centered Therapy. Psychoanalytic theory is marginalized by many university counseling programs; this is not evident from this book.

I believe that there are chaplains that could enjoy and use the material to deepen and improve their clinical practice. For example, he reflections on the cost and promise prayer, ritual, and physical touch are intriguing. Also the ways that a clinician communicates a trustworthy setting could be translated into bedside chaplaincy. I did not agree with Cooper-White on every detail which is a good thing. If everyone could agree with her reflections, she would be too general to be helpful.

Additional resources that would complement this work are a psychoanalytic dictionary, such as R. Chessick’s A Dictionary for Psychotherapists and a good introduction to postmodern understanding.

Pamela met the objectives she set for herself very well, and she made a significant contribution to the field of pastoral care and counseling.