From Counseling to Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy: A Life Time of Caring for Others ( Part II )

In the couple of pastoral care and counseling courses I took in seminary I mainly learned Client Centered Counseling (It was not called psychotherapy back in 1976.) Carl Rogers was the creator of this approach to counseling. He first called it client centered counseling and later person centered counseling. It was also known as humanistic therapy. (Remember that I had been introduced to Rogers in the college course on Humanistic Psychology.) The Rogerian approach was pretty basic and easily taught to beginning counselors, which ministerial students were. It was all about empathy, congruence, and unconditional positive regard. This approach fit in quite well with what I had been doing most of my life with others. I was also introduced to the interpersonalist psychoanalysts. They were all about the relationship with the client and the counselor, and being a 'participant observer" which simply meant you cared about the client, showed them that you cared through empathy, and formed a deep abiding relationship with them. ( Later I learned this is called the Therapeutic Alliance.) These interpersonalist psychoanalysts who helped inform my seminary pastoral counseling courses were: Harry Stack Sullivan and Erich Fromm. The one that stuck in my mind was Erich Fromm. My college girl friend ( who has been my wife for 46 years), had given me a book by Fromm entitled, The Art of Loving (1956.) It was a classic. I loved that book! (Ha!) And I still have it. ( You can figure out all the motives that might lie behind why I kept it all these years), but one reason I kept it was that I so agreed with it. In chapter 1 Fromm asks, Is Love an Art? Chapter 2 he titles, Love, the Answer to the Problem of Human Existence. He goes on in chapter 3 to speak of the Objects of Love and Love and its Disintegration in Contemporary Western Society. His last chapter spoke to me the most. It was: The Practice of Love. I remember that Fromm described for me that ministering to others, counseling, care and support, empathy, acceptance, etc., were all about the Practice of Love. So now my counseling was beginning to be explicitly infuenced by psychoanalysts, where it has been implicity influenced by them earlier--at least by Erich Fromm's Practice of Love. But there was more psychoanalytic influence to come while in seminary(1976-79.) I was also introduced there to the more Freudian Mainstream of Psychotherapy, but was taught that psychoanalysis was something that pastors needed to know about but that it was beyond our ability to do. And of course that was true. We might have two to three courses in seminary in pastoral counseling. That was enough training to prepare us to do brief, supportive counseling with our parishoners. Anything beyond that we were taught to refer our parishoners to professional therapists. So while a student in seminary, I had a good feel for what I was to do as a minister when it came to pastoral care and counseling. This would be one of four major tasks I was supposed to do. The other three were: Preach, Teach, and Administer the Education Program of the Church. So I did that. First, while still in seminary, I did an Internship in Campus Ministry at a private Catholic College. I followed that Internship with a job as the Interim Campus Minister at the state university. Upon graduating, I began my first full time ministry job as an associate pastor. But it seemed the longer I stayed in that first church job (total of four years), the more counseling I did. And it went beyond short term counseling. I saw one person weekly for maybe up to a year. This experience caused me to realize I needed more training. This man's problems were much more that I was prepared to handle. So as is my custom I began to read up a storm in the pastoral counseling field. And I entered psychonanalytic psychotherapy for myself with a local psychoanalyst and psychiatrist (1983.) Then what turned out to be a four year Residency in Ministry ended, and I moved into a position as a Pastor. ( Before taking the Pastor job I considered returning to campus ministry. I did not pursue that path and accepted my first pastor job.) Now I would still be doing the same four things I had done in my job as an associate, but as I stayed in the pastorate year after year, for a total of twelve years(1983-95), I became very close with many of the members and my pastoral counseling got deeper and deeper with them. I would set up formal appointment times for an hour each, and would do up to three months of counseling with certain ones. I was even covered, as a pastor, by my church liability insurance for doing pastoral counseling in my role as pastor. I was quite content doing this amount of pastoral counseling only, because I had so much else I had to do in preaching, teaching, and administering the church. But then I continued my own psychoanalytic psychotherapy with a new psychoanalyst and psychiatrist in the community. Throughout that experience I continued reading in the counseling field, and thought I might want to practice psychoanalytic psychotherapy myself. The book that influenced me the most at that point was Howard Clinebell's, Basic Types of Pastoral Counseling (1963)-- another classic in the pastoral counseling field. His book was an introduction to all the types of counseling a minister might wish to do including: marriage counseling, supportive counseling, counseling on Religous and Existential Questions, and what he called Depth Counseling. When I got to that Depth Counseling chapter in the book, I knew I was on the right track( I met Clinebell  while in pastoral psychotherapy training.)

Here is what he wrote on page 266 as the definition of Depth Counseling: " Depth pastoral counseling is a long-term helping process aimed at effecting depth changes in the counselee's personality by uncovering and dealing with hidden feelings, intrapsychic conflicts, and repressed early life memories. The terms insight counseling, pastoral psychotherapy, and depth pastoral psychotherapy are roughly synonymous." This is what I knew that I wanted to do. But to do this type of counseling/psychotherapy (notice the new word of psychotherapy), Clinebell wrote that you needed to be a "competent psychotherapist." Oh my, I was not that--not yet. Cinebell went on to write in that book about Sigmund Freud, Erik Erikson, and Carl Jung--all psychoanlaysts. He further went back to the interpersonalist psychoanalysts I had learned about in seminary, and in my wife's book gift by Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving. In the last chapter of his book Clinebell wrote about how to train for this type of pastoral psychotherapy. He wrote that I needed to contact the American Association of Pastoral Counselors (AAPC), and enroll in one of their Training Programs for Pastoral Psychotherapy. So after toying with the idea of becoming a Licensed Clincial Social Worker (LCSW), I decided to enter a Pastoral Psychotherapy Training Program. There I began to learn what Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy was. I learned that the goals of this type of psychotherapy were as follows: self awareness, insight, accepting care in a depth relationship, self acceptance, personal growth and maturity, etc. I learned that effective therapy, "reduces inner conflicts with their pain and wasted energy. It makes one more sensitive to the dynamics of one's relationships and to the pain of others. It helps one to find the courage to face the abyss of loneliness and existential anxiety." ( Clinebell pp. 272.) So everything I had learned about myself in my own analytic treatment, and now what I was learning in the pastoral psychotherapy training program, plus what I had learned and done from the time I was a child--these were all coming together, and I was on my way to soon becoming a full time therapist practicing pastoral psychoanalytic psychotherapy. In my next post I will share some of what I further learned about psychoanalytic psychotherapy while in training.