Selves In-Between: Offering Care and Forging Bonds with Difference (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781945935954)

This book is for religious professionals-pastors, pastoral counselors, therapists, and chaplains-anyone who wants a deeper understanding of healing in a ministry context. When persons seek healing through counseling, they bring embodied stories, problems, and issues. Counseling, as Lee defines it, is an in-between space where two selves interface and focus such that the client can experience healing to the fullest extent possible at that time, in that place. But how should we understand a self? And how does a healthy self relate to self, others, and God? Using the theoretical lens of Heinz Kohut's psychotherapy, particularly the concept of selfobject, AHyun Lee examines the importance of subjective experience of the self in search of healing. In so doing, she offers caregivers a means to develop a richer cultural and social sensitivity to work in their specific contexts, rather than drawing themselves into the normative representation and dominant expectations of others.