Revitalizing Faith Through Pastoral Counseling Book

Ryan LaMothe believes that pastoral counseling involves the practice and process of offering and creating a relationship and communal space where persons can revitalize their faith. He provides a faith-psychological model for understanding the practice of pastoral counseling as one of revitalizing faith. First the book integrates a dynamic-relational perspective of faith, which is both transcendent and immanent, and psychoanalytic-developmental theory, utilizing the metaphor of vitality as a bridge between the two and as a criterion for understanding the process and goals of pastoral counseling. Second, through a critical and constructive analysis of Winnicott's developmental perspective on the role of transitional objects, combined with a dynamic relational faith perspective, the book offers a reconstructed view of the vital functions of religious objects and practices in life-span development and their role in persons' dynamic-relational faith development. In addition, the book proposes a four-phase model of development that serves as a lens for understanding the conscious and unconscious inter-human ways of expressing and organizing faith in infancy through adulthood as well as in the transference and counter-transference realities of pastoral counseling. Third, this model, combined with the criteria associated with vitalized and devitalized faith, serves as a framework and tools for assessing client's difficulties in living, pastoral counseling interactions, interventions, and goals.