Book Review: Adolescents in Crisis

Abstract

tant section on grief. They sensitively represent the complex interplay between the reliving of past victimization and, through projection, the subtle potential for re-victimizing others. There is just one caution to be raised in this section pertaining to couples' therapy. The battered women's movement has long cautioned against couples' therapy where there is ongoing violence. Victims often cannot safely share deep experiences without risking retaliation. Therapists do need tools to address intense, chaotic couples' dynamics. At the same time, the authors' depth-oriented couples' method needs stronger safeguards against recurrence of violence, together with a more adequate analysis of power in intimate relationships, and how patriarchal privilege continues to reinforce violence against women. In Part III in general, "evil" rather fades from the picture, and the focus shifts mainly to clinical treatment of trauma. Parts II and III might both be strengthened by a more thorough integration of the clinical theory with explicitly religious language about God, sin, and theodicy (the authors' starting point in Part I). Part IV, then, which calls for a prophetic stance, represents a welcome return of theological language. For this reader, this was the most exciting and integrative section of the book. The authors argue against a splitting of prophetic response from pastoral care, and frame pastoral counseling itself as a form of cultural critique. They argue for an end in teaching and practice to a view of pastoral care and counseling as standing in opposition to social and political critique, and call for an integration of the two into a creative, holistic response to evil in all its guises. The strength of the book, its groundedness in clients' own experiences of evil and trauma, also in one way became its main weakness. In pastoral counseling, as in the counseling field in general, the vast majority of both counselors and clients are middle-class and white. Available forms of counseling have tended, in turn, to be captivated by medical and managed care models that have embedded racial and class privilege and cultural assumptions. By drawing on their own clinical experience with abuse survivors, the authors' account of evil and trauma stays experiencenear to their own clients' stories, but there is no explicit mention of race, class, sexual orientation, or social oppression. The authors' discussion of evil in Part I actually offered, without naming racism as such, a compelling description of the damages inflicted not only by sexual abuse but by racism and other systemic evils. Because the book is not intended solely as a book on sexual or domestic violence, it would have been enriched by more multi-cultural case examples (perhaps drawing from other practitioners working in different contexts), and by explicit references, both theoretical and case-related, to the racism, classism, heterosexism, and other forms of oppression that also deeply wound and dehumanize both selves and souls. In summary, although the book in some ways remains embedded in certain social, class, and clinical assumptions common in much pastoral psychotherapy practice today, it is a brave attempt to bring a serious theological understanding of evil into dialogue with the treatment of trauma. The authors have made an important effort to heal the split between the therapeutic and the prophetic in pastoral care and counseling. Trauma and Evil represents a useful resource for all those who take both trauma and evil seriously in our pastoral work today.