What happens in a pastoral counseling session?
The pastoral counseling session occupies an uneasy middle ground — it is neither analysis nor confession nor sermon, though it carries the genetic material of all three. What actually happens in it depends heavily on whether the counselor has recognized this ambiguity or is being driven by it unconsciously.
Hillman's Insearch offers the most searching account of what is structurally at work before the session even begins. The counselor arrives with needs — for intimacy, for instruction, for redemption, for the expression of a call — and these needs are already shaping the space into which the parishioner walks:
"If I am a father, he must become a child; if I am a healer, he must be ill; and if I am enlightened, he must be benighted and astray. These images are part of the set, the scenic background into which, as on to a stage, the other person makes his entry."
This is not a critique of pastoral work — it is a description of the archetypal field that any helping encounter activates. The wounded-healer archetype, which Samuels (1985) traces through Meier's parallel between the Asklepian temenos and the analytic setting, operates here as much as in formal analysis: the counselor projects his own inner wound into the parishioner, and the parishioner projects his inner healer onto the counselor. What is distinctive about pastoral work is that this dynamic is rarely named, and the Christian identification — the imitatio Christi sliding unconsciously into identificatio Christi — can run the session without anyone noticing.
Hillman is precise about the risk: the minister who consciously pursues an imitation of medical psychology while unconsciously motivated by one of the Christ images leaves the parishioner uncertain whether he is ill or sinful, rationally diagnosed or irrationally demanded from. The session becomes a confused double register. His prescription is not that the minister abandon depth psychology but that he follow the imitatio Christi consciously — caring for souls by living his own destiny fully — rather than imitating psychotherapy while Christ works from behind.
What the session can do well, when it is working, is what Edinger (2002) identifies as the constellating of the confessional archetype. Jung himself located the origins of analytic treatment in the confessional: the possession of a secret acts as a psychic poison, and the act of confession — of throwing oneself back into the arms of humanity — dissolves the moral exile that isolation creates. In a pastoral session, this dynamic is available in a form that carries the weight of a tradition: the parishioner arrives already inside a symbolic container that has held suffering for centuries. The temenos is pre-built. The question is whether the counselor can hold it without inflating it.
The session's characteristic failure mode is curiosity in the Bernardine sense — not the morbid voyeurism Hillman also names, but the subtler failing of the ego's need to ferret out causes, to piece together a case history, to answer the question why before the soul has had time to speak in its own register. St. Bernard of Clairvaux identified curiositas as the primary step off the path, and Hillman reads this clinically: the counselor's interpretive eagerness forecloses the unconscious arriving in its own time. The ear — what Hillman calls "the feminine part of the head," consciousness offering maximum attention with minimum intention — is the organ the session requires. The hand, which makes and does and directs, is the organ that ruins it.
What actually happens, then, in a pastoral counseling session that is working: the parishioner speaks from a suffering that has not yet found its form. The counselor listens with the ear rather than the hand, holds the archetypal field without inflating it into a Christ-identification, allows the confessional dynamic to do its ancient work, and resists the curiosity that would convert the soul's speech into a case. The session does not cure. It holds. And in the holding, something that was isolated becomes, briefly, communal — which is what confession has always been for.
- James Hillman — portrait of the founder of archetypal psychology, whose Insearch remains the most searching account of the counselor's unconscious needs
- wounded healer — the Asklepian archetype underlying both pastoral and analytic work
- shadow — the unconscious identifications that shape the counselor's set before the session begins
- individuation — Jung's account of the soul's path, which pastoral work at its best serves without directing
Sources Cited
- Hillman, James, 1967, Insearch: Psychology and Religion
- Samuels, Andrew, 1985, Jung and the Post-Jungians
- Edinger, Edward F., 2002, Science of the Soul: A Jungian Perspective