DIV 3053 Contemporary Psychotherapy and Pastoral Counseling Vanderbilt Divinity School Spring 2015 Tuesday, 2:10PM-4:00PM; Room: Divinity G-19A Instructor: Bruce Rogers-Vaughn Phone: (Cell) (615) 969-3083 Email: Bruce.Vaughn@Vanderbilt.Edu Given that I am a part-time faculty member, availability is something of a challenge. However, I wish to be as accessible to you as possible. Because I am frequently in sessions with psychotherapy patients, you will often find it difficult to reach me directly. You may, however, leave a message on my cell phone voicemail. I will also be checking my email regularly, and that is perhaps the best way to reach me. Furthermore, I will be available before and after class for brief conversations. In addition, arrangements can be made for meeting at my on campus office on Tuesdays between 8:30AM and 10:45AM, and between 1:00PM and 1:45PM. I can also arrange meetings at my psychotherapy office by appointment. Should you need my time, please ask me about making arrangements. Course Description Perspective and Presuppositions This seminar is not a “how to” course on counseling. It does not aim primarily for skill development, if this is understood as the application of counseling techniques. Rather, it attempts to aid the participants in attaining a deeper appreciation and understanding of pastoral counseling and psychotherapy so that they may become caregivers who embody and enact a form of counsel that is distinctively pastoral. This accords with the view that the person of the therapist (specifically, the pastoral relationship itself), not tools and techniques, constitutes the agent of change. Similarly, this course embraces the perspective that pastoral psychotherapy is not the application or practice of anything (psychological or theological). Rather, it is a process of participant observation in which the therapist and the person seeking help co-create a relationship that engenders a process of constructive change on behalf of the one seeking help. (Significantly, this also induces change in the therapist as well.) The realities which psychology and theology attempt to describe are already present in this relational process. In Winnicott’s terms, the pastoral psychotherapeutic relationship is a transitional space in which the emergent meanings are neither created nor discovered but are simply already there. To use Martin Buber’s words, it is a discrete instance of “the between” in which the dynamics of that space are simultaneously enacted and reflected upon. This indicates that this seminar is a course in pastoral theology. The preceding understanding, however, underscores that it seeks neither to apply pastoral theological concepts nor simply to utilize experience for the purpose of “doing pastoral theology.”