On the technology of pastoral counseling

Formal pastoral counseling is developing as a significant and important counseling movement. Yet because of its historical tradition and current secular social climate, the pastoral counselor seems unable to translate theology and the religious model of suffering and illness into a concrete methodology of care-giving. This paper proposes that the priestly function or priest/rabbi/minister-parishioner relationship is a good place for the counselor to start identifying the religious methods and means of being with and caring for suffering individuals. The traditional practice of borrowing the psychology of the day is challenged as undermining pastoral counseling, as clergy men and women give up their own symbolic language for psychiatric jargon.Dr. Mollica will be a Fullbright Scholar at the University of Essex, Colchester, England, from August, 1977–May 1980.