Oskar Pfister and the Taggart Report: The “First Pastoral Counselor” and Today's Role Problems

Abstract

The purpose of this article, in the Centennial year of the birth of the “first pastoral counselor,” is to examine the counseling role as detailed in the Taggart report in the perspective of Pftster's role correlation and its methodological underpinnings. It is concluded from Pftster's dialogues with Freud that his theoretical foundation was inadequate for the role synthesis he groped after, but that he points us toward the necessity of a greater theological understanding of our pastoral counseling role and of its relation to pastoral care in general, particularly care by, and of, social structures.