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

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.

Pamela Cooper-White, MDiv, PhD, LCPC, is Christiane Brooks Johnson Professor Emerita of Psychology and Religion and dean emerita at Union Theological Seminary in New York; an Episcopal priest and licensed psychotherapist; and the 2013-2014 Fulbright-Freud Scholar of Psychoanalysis in Vienna, Austria. An award-winning author, she has published ten books, including Many Voices: Pastoral Psychotherapy in Relational and Theological Perspective and The Psychology of Christian Nationalism. She is active on several editorial, academic, and psychoanalytic boards, and is a frequent speaker nationally and internationally.