Religious and Counseling Discourses in Clinical Practice

Hegemony of Discourses

One possible explanation for the difference of themes crossing from speaker to speaker, moving from the religious domain to the counseling subject arena and vice versa within individual interviews, may be inferred from Hoare and Smith (2018) theory of the hegemony of discourses. Hoare and Smith (2018) described cultural strata, composed of group memberships or participation in activities, within which a speaker might draw on the language of other speakers within in seeking to describe experience.

The Catholic Christian faith and Church and the counseling profession are two such strata. Following the Hoare and Smith (2018) assertations, it can be assumed that some of the terms selected by speakers from that culturally stratified language (i.e., discourses) may achieve hegemony. In other words, certain discourses (expressed in images, principles, constructs) are transmitted from speaker to speaker and may become part of a short- or long-term common language about the phenomena in question. In fact, this appears to be borne out by discursive patterns observed in this study.

The discourses which emerged in the interviews of all the participants in this study (the value and beauty of Catholic Christian faith for life and for counseling; autonomy and obedience; healing, renewal, and the call to serve) appear to be extensively represented in the literature of counseling, religion, and both. For example, discourses from faith healing and exorcism, as well as psychotherapy and addiction recovery are amply represented and discussed in the literatures of faith and counseling, in some cases in centuries-old materials (Barry and Connolly, 2009; Belmontes, 2018; Christopherson, 1994; Harrow, 2005; Monter, 2012; Rusu, 2016; Smith, 2005; Stuckenbruck, 2013). Materials relating to the themes of autonomy and obedience and the value of faith for counseling practice and for living showed the same pattern.

The theme of autonomy and obedience, for example, was found to be linked to ecclesiastical thought about conscience in moral decision-making, referenced in the Catholic Catechism (U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops, 1997) as well as to the topic of clericalism in the Church (Doyle, 2003; Harvey, 2018; Oldmixon et al., 2013). Autonomy and obedience appear in the counseling literature, in turn, in relation to counselee autonomy and the need for counselor bracketing of values, as referenced, for instance, in the American Counseling Association Code of Ethics (2014).

Another theme shared across interviews was that of healing, renewal, and being called to serve. This was shown to be linked to prominent religious discourses about conversion, healing, and vocation, as well as to the practice of providing counseling treatment (Christopherson, 1994; Kern, 1994; Lamberty, 2017; Louw, 2011; Smith, 2005). Healing, renewal, and the call to serve thus appeared to be threaded into a network of past thought, in both religious and counseling discourse, as related in numerous texts in both disciplines.

The themes with the discourses they carry appear not only in the texts of the study interviews but also appear to be embedded in a network of discourses propagated through the cultures of religion and profession. This suggests they are hegemonic. That is, those themes are embedded in the cultures of religion and counseling of which the counselors discussing them are members (or “deputies,” as Hoare and Smith [2018, p. 98 ] might say).

Hoare and Smith (2018) termed the functions of thinkers’/speakers’ potential influence in the discursive world as both “organisational and connective” (p. 97). This came to the foreground as the participants sought to organize and connect ideas from two disparate discursive strata, the religious tradition and the counseling profession. Although the counselors discussed and combined the discourses in somewhat different terms in their respective interviews, the themes and discourses themselves likely appeared in the thought and speech of these counselors in the first place because those ideas are hegemonic.

In contrast with the three identified themes that could be said to be hegemonic, the other set of topics, those found moving within individual counselor's interviews, appeared to be more personal to the speaker and they sometimes seemed to bring more tension. For example, the theme of the integrated whole appears at times in church literature and thought, particularly that derived from medieval discourses (Harvey, 2018), and rarely mentioned in the counseling literature. Ann, for instance, drew a parallel between her traditional, wraparound experience of Catholic Christianity and the collaborative practices common in counseling, but Santiago complained of the limitations of counseling theories that claim to be comprehensive but are not. Again, this suggests that the themes in the first set, those moving across interviews with different counselors, are hegemonic, while themes in the second set are not, or are less so.

In another example of non-hegemonic discourses in the interviews and the literature, questions of inclusion and relational concerns are generally addressed in religious and counseling literature. This topic from the interview material represented experience in flux, reflected in the narratives of Jane and Lauren, who described struggles with maintaining social connection alongside the upholding of faith tenets. It may be that ideas emerging from those conflicts are in the process of becoming hegemonic. Recent controversies, among religious groups as well as the counseling profession, over inclusion issues with respect to gender, sexual orientation, cultural origin, and religious background suggest there is discursive and cultural movement underway, which contributes to change in both domains. This follows the prediction of Hoare and Smith (2018) about how shifts in ideology occur through hegemony of discourses.

The more hegemonic themes (the value of faith for life and counseling; autonomy and obedience; healing, renewal, and call to service) have probably influenced a wide audience. The themes appear to have infused the language stratum (Bakhtin, 1981) of that topic. Because they are so widely covered in the literature of religion or counseling, it can be assumed that they have persuaded many, and there is likely a preponderance of assent among members of each cultural grouping.

Analogization in Counseling and Religious Discourses

Another phenomenon observed in the interviews is analogization. The arbitrariness of the juxtaposition of signifier and signified was described in the late nineteenth century by the linguist Saussure (1915) and cited by the discourse analyst Kristeva (2002). Within that conception of language, Saussure posited a mechanism of analogies drawn by speakers/agents in the course of verbal communication as one means by which language evolves: phonetically, grammatically, and semiotically. In the case of the interviews with counselors-in-training, a similar analogical pattern was observed in that, at times, participants drew analogies between phenomena or ideas in counseling and Catholic Christianity. Invited to describe their religious and counseling knowledge and experiences in an interview, they pointed to unexpected similarities or previously unseen connections between the two. In drawing such analogies, they generated new ways of talking about those phenomena, or new language. It is thus possible that one mechanism at work in the speech of the participants interviewed is analogization.

Saussure (1915) described the forming of analogy as a psychological process: “Any creation must be preceded by an unconscious comparison of materials deposited in the treasure chest of language, where generative models are arranged according to their syntagmatic and associative relationships” (location 3181; translation Pearson). It was reasonable, therefore, to look for traces of analogy-making in the material from the interviews for the study (Pearson et al., 2023).

The drawing of analogies between elements of one area of endeavor or theory and elements of another was seen, for example, in the interview material of Ingrid. She talked about her experience of the Eucharist, which connects her to loved ones she has lost through death. Her analogy was between relating as living relatives and relating after death, spiritually. In a similar pattern, Kiwi compared using dialectical behavior therapy in counseling to helicopter engine repair, then drew a third analogy between those and life in a homogeneous Catholic community. Santiago analogized interacting with priest friends with a counseling alliance with a professional counselor. Also, Kiley's comparison of a priest during the confession of a parishioner or a rabbi to a counselor represents another vivid analogy.

Other instances of the analogical process were Lauren's comparing demonic possession to addiction to pornography, cases of which she has presumably seen in her couple and family practice, and Kiley's comparison of Church teachings to traffic laws. In each of these examples, the speaker compared phenomena from two different strata of experience—traffic law and religious teachings, clergy member and counselor, demonic possession and addiction—to explain a point of view or describe a meaningful experience.

For Saussure (1915), the two halves of each analogy, that is, the items that have been unconsciously compared beforehand (possession and addiction, priest and counselor, and so forth), are drawn from “generative models” (location 3181) in the consciousness of the speaker. Those models are arranged by the speaker, as the speaker communicates, in accordance with the relationships the speaker perceives in language. Arranged as neighbors within the analogy, the terms/units together generate new understandings about themselves and each other, in the moment, for both listener and speaker. In each of the instances previously cited from the interviews, the speaker drew an analogy for the purpose of communicating new knowledge as effectively as possible—to explicate, justify, or make an inner awareness understandable to the interviewer.

As noted above, Saussure (1915) believed the mechanism of analogy to be prompted by “an unconscious comparison of materials” (location 3181) in one's linguistic or ideological store. From there, it is plausible to assume a frequent comparison of ideas from various experiences or subjects going on within the speaking individual. Several of the participants acknowledged misinformation about their Catholic tradition that seems to circulate in American culture, sometimes in the form of false analogies. For example, Jane and Kiley mentioned the erroneous belief they have heard that Catholics worship the Virgin Mary and other saints as if they were gods. This misconception may be a result of anti-Catholic prejudice, or a simple misunderstanding of language used about prayer in different traditions, but in the majority-Protestant United States, Catholics find themselves having to explain aspects of their practices to the uninformed. Jane described confusing and hurtful experiences growing up Catholic in an area that was largely evangelical Protestant:

It's frustrating because it's like I think religion can be so freeing but also utilized as a weapon, and that's what I don't understand. It's like, why is this teaching [such as Catholics worshipping the Virgin Mary] being used as a weapon to other people or a level of oppression, like I'm a better Christian than you because I'm this faith and you're this faith. And my faith is better than your faith. I remember going to other churches and in the sermon the preacher would make a Catholic joke. It's like, we're at church. Like, what? One of my friend's mom was like, “He never does that until you're here, and he doesn't even know you're Catholic.” I was like, “But he shouldn't be doing it at all.” (Jane, 243–252)

Conflict between discourses of the counseling profession and Catholic Christianity may activate the generation of analogies as well. The authors saw that potential conflicts counselors perceived between Catholic teachings and counseling ethics, or between counseling ethical principles and the counselors’ experiences around inclusion, seemed to invite them into a process of evaluation. This led to the use of various discursive tactics in making sense of the differences. These included synthesis and deconstruction of ideas from the two subject areas, but also the use of analogy, as when Santiago, a participant in the study, compared accepting or rejecting certain Catholic teachings to a “cafeteria” (Santiago, 294) approach to faith practice.

As discerned in the data for the study, new analogies constituted or reinforced points the speaker was making, and these, in turn, transmitted new ideas. These ideas or discourses supplemented or supplanted the former conceptions counselors had of those materials. According to Saussure (1915, location 3247), innovating through analogies, in the case of language development, is an act of interpretation, and that interpretive process was observed to occur in the texts of the interviews. In language, “of the enormous mass of analogical phenomena that several centuries of evolution have left us, almost all the elements are conserved; they are all merely distributed in new ways” (location 3293; translation Pearson). This appears to be true of discourses in the interviews; they migrate and get reinterpreted, and in effect this reinterpretation or recombination results in new discourses.

Discourses then—counseling or religious—are refracted and regenerated through analogy, by a process of comparison followed by interpretation. The format of the interviews, with direct questions prompting the participants to consider the “generative models” (Saussure, 1915, location 3181) of groups of ideas and vocabulary proper to two disciplines with which they were very familiar, led to the drawing of analogies between experiences in the two cultural groups (religion and counseling). This enabled participants to describe their experience more vividly or expound more extensively on their beliefs about how the two pursuits operate in their lives and work. For these religious counselors, an implicit analogy of counseling with religion emerged. The resulting evaluation seemed to lead to the conclusion that the two domains could agree or match, ideationally or morally. This prompted more discussion and more analogies as they grappled with perceived differences or conflicts, as observed.

One might speculate that counselors, as compared to other professionals, are especially prone to drawing analogies and acting on them. Their training in diagnosing and treating disorders requires that they constantly compare and contrast analogous symptoms, the relative success of different treatment protocols, and different case conceptualizations as a means of improving outcomes over time. It may also be the case that certain religious symbols or rituals, too, are especially effective in evoking the drawing of analogies between things or states otherwise considered quite different: Ingrid's reflection around her experience of the mass, evoking living connections as she remembers the dead, or Mary's crucifix reminding her of the presence of her siblings while they were very far apart geographically. The synchronous evocation of two qualities in one object or moment is thought to be a feature of such symbols. In a book on Christian liturgics, Hatchett (1976) explained,

A symbol does more than signify: it reveals; it holds together apparently disparate elements (as when the Fathers spoke of Christ as Symbol – God and Man); it binds a community together; it has power over those for whom it is a symbol; it recalls; it extends frames of reference … symbols speak to the whole man. (p. 12)

Forces and Counterforces: Dialogism

A third schema was suggested by examining the discursive patterns in the talk of participants about their religious and counseling ideologies. Bakhtin (1981) found at the center of all utterances: the individual appropriation of languages and dialogization of discourses. Counseling is a social interaction in which speakers engage from within specific cultural and chronological locations.

Hodges (2015), a discourse analyst, emphasized that all interaction requires speakers as well as their interlocutors to communicate in response to earlier language and with a variety of possible responses. Jeremy, for example, mentioned a preference for narrative therapy in his counseling work, and Lauren stated she often uses structural approaches; both narrative and structural approaches are considered types of constructivist therapy (Omer, 1996).

Constructivism begins with the premise that stories, rules, and problems are built as they are talked about, usually in interpersonal conversation such as storytelling or psychotherapy (Omer, 1996). The speaker creates (rather than describes) phenomena through verbalizing events and descriptions, typically using familiar terminology. The speaker is not reporting on objectively preexisting phenomena. Constructivism is the source of therapeutic efficacy. According to the theory, “The therapeutic process may … be viewed as a cooperative editorial enterprise by means of which the gaps [lapses in detail about motivations or behaviors of self or others] are gradually filled in, making the narrative continuous and coherent” (Omer, 1996, p. 327). Naturally, the process prompts speakers to “draw on established genres” and “orient to anticipated responses” (Hodges, 2015, p. 141). In other words, sets of discourses are present with the speakers and interact as they do.

In constructivist therapies, verbalization is a moment-to-moment process, utilizing the language available. It could be said that the therapist and counselee are developing a new language for the situation, a new set of terms (i.e., syntagmas) as they (re-)narrate problems, rules, or stories. This perception about therapy, as described by Omer (1996) points in turn to the work of Bakhtin (1981), which offers a frame for the analysis of much of the interview data for this study.

Bakhtin (1981), a trained philosopher, professor of literature, and specialist in prose fiction, analyzed the use of discourses and language in a specific context, not in psychotherapy, but in the generating of another type of narrative: the novel (Holquist, 2002). In describing the human use of language, Bakhtin (1981) posited that the working of certain opposing forces of which speakers and listeners are customarily unaware. One such force unifies; it gathers and keeps together words, syntagmas (clusters of words structurally related so as to confer meaning on the set), and discourses belonging to a specialty, or stratum of language, and associated with a cultural group. He called this first force centripetal, analogizing from physics. Cultural clusters in which unifying or centripetal linguistic forces operate include professionals, such as school and clinical counselors, as well as religious groups, such as Catholic Christians, and political parties, geographical regions, scholarly disciplines, and so forth (Bakhtin, 1981). The countervailing force in language, the centrifugal or dispersive, is deconstructive. It moves vocabulary and discourses outward from their groups and generalizes, recombines, or reuses them in other groupings, often with new applications or shades of meaning (Bakhtin, 1981).

Bakhtin (1981) associated the centripetal force with a momentarily unified language, a specific set of vocabulary or discourses, while the centrifugal related to his concept of “heteroglossia” (p. 295), that is, the presence of other available sets of vocabulary or discourses (glossia = languages). Bakhtin was interested in describing the formation of the utterance itself. However, while the centripetal and centrifugal forces are exerted in synchronic fashion, that is, at the moment of utterance, the unification of a group language precedes the moment of utterance, sometimes by centuries. It is thus diachronic.

As language is used socially, then, it stratifies into new language sets with new purposes. With a new purpose, the speakers/writers who carry with them and are confronted by heteroglossia, exert a diffusive, centrifugal pull on the specialty vocabularies. They generalize those other, preexisting glossia, putting them to other uses and using them in other vocabularies. The communicative interaction of subjects could exert, in turn, a unifying (centripetal) force on any new specialty language that emerges. Speakers participate thereby in what Bakhtin (1981) called “the forces of historical becoming that serve to stratify language” (p. 325). He insisted that this process is fertile, generative: “This stratification and heteroglossia, once realized, is not only a static invariant of linguistic life, but also what ensures its dynamics: stratification and heteroglossia widen and deepen as long as language is alive and developing” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 272).

This dynamic, dialogic process can be seen at work in the ideational and linguistic development within a unified, specialty language (and community) such as that of Catholic Christianity. In this regard, for example, McCallion and Bennett-Carpenter (2012) analyzed the relatively recent rise of the New Evangelization (NE) movement in the Church and its effects on lay and clerical Catholics in the Detroit area. The authors identified two discursive themes competing and triggering tension among some members of the Church.

The first was a hybrid of Catholic charismatic trends and conservative American Protestant Evangelical Christianity, evangelical discourses which contrasted with modern, Vatican II Catholic discourse about the Church as the People of God and the theologies deriving from it. The authors showed that, rhetorically, the NE movement, with its emphasis on individualism and on only one Person of the Trinity (Jesus Christ), contrasts sharply with the modernist, inclusivizing reforms of the Church brought by Vatican II with their emphasis on social outreach.

In analyzing the talk and written text of documents produced by a broad range of the diocesan membership in Detroit, McCallion and Bennett-Carpenter (2012) concluded that this sort of intra-ecclesial discursive struggle is not a new phenomenon and that, historically, such conflicts have generated new discourses, spurring new institutional movement and energy:

Religious communities endure, promote, and frequently survive rhetorical tensions generated by individualism versus communal priorities. The long history of the Catholic Church itself is replete with such conflicts, some having resulted in significant schisms, but many more having produced eventual institutional accommodation. (McCallion & Bennett-Carpenter, 2012, p. 309)

One may consider some examples offered in the interviews (Pearson et al., 2023). In each instance, two or more discourses from different domains were invoked, each from a unified vocabulary set (or language), and then held together, momentarily, by the speaker. Such utterances at the meeting point of those competing linguistic forces were found in Joseph's, Lauren's, Ingrid's, and Ann's interviews, as described below.

One can at times observe in the interview texts a counselor's holding two discourses in consciousness while verbalizing a third. In discussing ethics, Joseph described how he experienced influences from his faith in parallel with his counseling beliefs:

I mean even Man's Search for Meaning is very spiritual and it's- In its foundation. It's hard to argue with that I don't have any sort of religious or spiritual influence when I'm using existentialism …Yeah, I think the existential piece- I think the more the existentialism part comes into my faith is searching for something greater, if that makes sense. Whether that's a search for meaning or search for just understanding from a higher power, I think that that's kind of where my Catholicism comes in. Because right now in my religious development, I'm very much at the point where I'm trying to understand things about the faith, so to speak. (Joseph, 263–286)

Lauren acknowledged a contrast between the Catholic Catechism (U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops, 1997) with the importance in counseling ethics discourse of multicultural inclusion in working with LGBT + and other persons. Similar to Joseph, a dialogic process appeared to be in play in her interview. Like Joseph, she used filler words and slightly shorter phrases and paused as she compared the contrasting discourses and discerned the implications of the comparison. Fairclough (2013) would probably refer to Lauren's and Joseph's use of filler words and momentary hesitations as an aspect of the texture of the text. For him, their use in speech may suggest hesitation on a speaker's part, what he called “the distribution of ‘hedging’ expressions such as ‘or something’, ‘just’, ‘kind of’, ‘sort of’, and ‘modalising’ expressions such as ‘maybe’, ‘we thought’, ‘I think’, which mitigate in various ways degrees of commitment to propositions and proposals” (Fairclough, 2013, p. 216).

In the context of these interviews, such hesitation might also reflect the presence of conflicting centripetal (unifying) and centrifugal (diverging) forces at work. For Lauren, as for other counselors interviewed and other dialogic moments, the discourses (Fairclough's “propositions and proposals”) in counseling ethics and in her understanding of the teaching of her faith tradition (around sexual orientation) had theretofore belonged to separate domains and texts. In the interview, she brought them together for comparison, reflecting on what her own position will be on the subject.

In other examples of the dialogic process, Ingrid, Ann, and Mary spoke of Church teachings as providing guidelines, or articulations of values, enabling them as autonomous agents to make moral choices. Ingrid affirmed, “I believe that that's kind of what God and Jesus has allowed all of us to do. You know, to kind of figure it out, and what feels right” (Ingrid, 200–201). All three participants explicitly affirmed the importance of autonomy, for them a construct formulated from dialogized discourses from counseling ethics and Catholic moral theology. They also described the use of Catholic teachings in ways similar to the manner in which counselors typically use sets of clinical guidelines.

In each of the examples cited above from the text of the interviews, there is perceptible the pull and counterpull of the unifying and diversifying, centripetal and centrifugal forces holding together the discourses and vocabularies of counseling and Catholicism. As Bakhtin (1981) described, each is inevitably met by the heteroglot, centrifugal force of the other domain's language, moving the speech of the individual participant and generating new language.

This dialogic process presumably enabled them to interpret, and probably to manage, the “particularity” of their experience lived as both counselors and Catholic Christians.