Eine Studie über die psycho-dynamischen Aufgaben für die Seelsorge zu Kirchenmitgliedern, die übermäßig vom Pastor abhängig sind = A Study of the Psycho-dynamic Tasks for Pastoral Care of Church Members Who Are Overly Dependent on the Pastor

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Many people believe that pastors have a duty to care for church members not only on a religious dimension but also on a mental-spiritual, excluding consideration of life situations and conditions. Of course, pastors also believe that they have a duty to care for their members at various dimension, so they obsessively take care of their members. Such obsessive thinking of pastors is bound to have a serious negative impact not only on the pastor but also on the church members. In particular, it causes mental atrophy and feelings of inferiority in pastors. If pastors fail to provide the care that the church members want, they may feel anxious that they will be viewed as an ‘incompetent pastor’ or a ‘pastor who does not love the church members’. Therefore, pastors believe that they must unconditionally satisfy the needs of church members, and to do this, they have to respond sensitively to the needs of church members. However, at this time, the pastor feels pain and experiences great conflict and difficulty in caring for the congregation due to the congregation members being overly dependent on the pastor and obsessing over the pastor unilaterally satisfying their needs. In other words, church members show immaturity, such as obsession and dependence on the pastor, and naturally hand over their life tasks and duties to the pastor, just as a child unconsciously entrusts the tasks of its growth and maturity to its caregivers.
The obsession and dependence of these church members toward their pastors is clearly related to ‘regression.’ Regression is a symptom commonly discovered by clients during the counseling process, and temporary-limited regression is considered a necessary element of the client's mental-emotional recovery. However, continuous regression is a key factor that makes clients immature, and this equally applies to pastoral care. Therefore, pastors who must provide a facilitative environment for the maturation process of church members must be able to identify the causes of church members dependence and obsession toward the pastor and apply this to pastoral care. Through this thesis, I aim to discover the reasons for church members dependence on pastors from a psycho-dynamic dimension and study ways to apply this to care. In particular, just as the ‘good enough care’ provided by a caregiver to a young child stimulates his or her growth and maturity, I am trying to study ways in which pastors can provide ‘good enough care’ to their church members while helping them move toward mental and spiritual maturity. In addition, by understanding the risks a pastor may experience in a pastoral care situation due to church members who are obsessed with and dependent on the pastor, I want to provide an opportunity for him to find ways to escape from these risks on his own. I hope that this study will be helpful to pastors who are suffering due to their congregation's dependence and obsession with their pastors.