Many Voices: Pastoral Psychotherapy in Relational and Theological Perspective

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.