AN OVERVIEW OF THE CONTENTS AND MODELS OF INTEGRATION IN CHRISTIAN COUNSELING

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

There has been a long history of struggles in establishing Christian counseling among Christian psychologists, counselors, and psychotherapists. Perhaps for the first time in the history of counseling and psychotherapy, science and religion were separated. The role of science was to observe and to describe the given phenomena. The role of religion was to make a value judgment. On the theoretical level, the separation of the two has been possible. But on the practical level, the two cannot be completely separated. Counseling and psychotherapy is the activity in the area of applied science, in which the description and value judgment go hand in hand. Especially, Christian counselors and psychotherapists strongly feel that they have to deal with both areas in their clinical practice. The discipline of Christian counseling comes out of the necessity of blending together the two areas of description and value judgment.
To deal with the two areas is not easy for Christian counselors and psychotherapists. Since Fritz Kunkel first used the term "integration" in 1953 (Vande Kemp, 1996, p. 77), there has been great confusion about the integration between science and religion until recent years. Scholars use the term integration inconsistently. Some scholars prefer the theoretical approach to integration while other scholars prefer the practical approach. Scholars differ not just on how to integrate the two approaches, but also on what exactly to integrate. It seems that the agreement of what and of how to integrate is almost impossible because of the great variety of integrative works.
Even though the concern for blending together the two areas is increasing, there is little direction on how to proceed. This article has been written in the context of the confusion of integration and tries to show the whole spectrum of integration between science and religion in the area of counseling and psychotherapy. By presenting the spectrum, the readers will grasp the whole picture of the struggle of integration during the past few decades. A number of articles and books available are used for the analysis and synthesis. Most of the articles for integration have been published in the Journal of Psychology and Theology or the Journal of Psychology and Christianity, which are two leading journals for integration. This article will present the contents and models of integration. Concerning content, many areas will be covered, such as the history of integration, the concept of integration, the goals of counseling, and the different characteristics of Christian counseling. Concerning integration, the various approaches to integration will be presented. The models of the different approaches will be examined and compared. In the conclusion, useful models for analyzing integration will be suggested, with the hope that readers can use the suggested framework to understand better the various forms of integration.