The Willie Lomans of a Market Society: Addressing Political-Economic Sources of Suffering in Pastoral Counseling

This article focuses on the culture of state-corporate capitalism as a source of psychological suffering for some people who seek the aid of pastoral counselors. An underlying premise of this article and, more particularly, the work of pastoral counseling comes from Frantz Fanon’s view that the aims...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of pastoral care & counseling
Main Author: LaMothe, Ryan 1955- (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Sage Publishing 2015
In: Journal of pastoral care & counseling
Further subjects:B Pastoral Counseling
B Internalization
B market society
B Suffering
B Dissociation
B Capitalism
Online Access: Volltext (lizenzpflichtig)
Description
Summary:This article focuses on the culture of state-corporate capitalism as a source of psychological suffering for some people who seek the aid of pastoral counselors. An underlying premise of this article and, more particularly, the work of pastoral counseling comes from Frantz Fanon’s view that the aims of psychotherapy are (a) ‘to ‘consciousnessize’ [the patient’s] unconscious, to no longer be tempted by a hallucinatory lactification’, and (b) ‘to enable [the patient] to choose an action with respect to the real source of the conflict, i.e., the social structure’. An aim of pastoral counseling, then, is to facilitate recognition of a person’s sources of suffering so that s/he can decide how to respond. By contrast, it is argued that a pastoral counselor, in leaving a client unaware that his/her suffering is partially the result of a capitalistic culture, fosters hermeneutical mystification, and the patient is not able to choose an action directed toward a major source of his/her depression.
ISSN:2167-776X
Contains:Enthalten in: Journal of pastoral care & counseling
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1177/1542305015586774