Resisting Self-spirituality: Counselling as Spirituality in the Dialogues of Hans Schauder and Marcus Lefébure

Abstract

In the 1980s, a short series of dialogues on counselling between Hans Schauder (1911–2001), a medically trained counsellor, and Marcus Lefébure (1933–2012), a Roman Catholic monk, were published in the UK. These dialogues present counselling as a form of contemporary spirituality, arguing that counselling facilitates spiritual experience and that psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic concepts can be understood in spiritual terms. However, the dialogues also present a critique of the authorisation of subjectivity within both counselling and spirituality; in so doing, they anticipate and elaborate later criticisms of Paul Heelas and Linda Woodhead's spiritual revolution thesis. The resistance in the Schauder–Lefébure dialogues to Self-spirituality indicates that they align more with politically critical progressive spirituality than with accommodationist capitalist spirituality.

Acknowledgements

The research leading to this article was supported by the AHRC/ESRC Religion and Society Programme with a large research project grant for “Theology and Therapy: Christianity, Psychotherapy & Spirituality in Scotland 1945–2000”. Thanks are due to my fellow team members for their comments during the writing of the article—Professor David Fergusson, Professor Liz Bondi, and Dr Steven Sutcliffe.

Notes

Notes

1. The biographical sketch of Schauder is summarised from two sources. The first is a brief obituary of Schauder published in 2001 in The Scotsman newspaper (Dawson and Kerkovius). The second is Schauder's biography. This was dictated to its author by Schauder, making it a biography told in the first person (Franke).

2. The biographical sketch of Lefébure is summarised from authorial information given in Conversations. There is also some use of personal communications from Lefébure's former colleague, Fr Fergus Kerr.