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In this addition to the SPCK's New Library of Pastoral Care, Perry aims ‘to offer to all those working in pastoral settings … a way of understanding the intricacies of relationships between and within people’ (p. 6). The word ‘pastoral’ is not defined in any restrictive ecclesiastical sense. The author takes the word in its original meaning of ‘nourishing’. So workers in a wide variety of professional settings, such as counsellors and social workers, are included in his purview. Nevertheless, many of his examples concern clergy and other church workers, and appear to be drawn from his experience as a consultant for the London Diocese Pastoral Support Group Scheme. The SPCK imprint, too, suggests that the book is likely to be most used by clergy and church workers. In offering them a theoretical framework for their pastoral encounters based on the work of Jung, Perry is breaking new ground.
Perry's approach can be illustrated from the way that he tackles the question of ‘discerning the Pastoral calling’ in the first chapter. Here he brings together Eadie's work on the ‘helping personality’ and Jung's idea of the shadow, particularly as applied by Guggenbühl-Craig to the exercise of power in the helping professions. On this basis Perry draws a picture of the kind of inadequate motivations that can move people towards a pastoral calling. As the source of more positive motivation, he draws on Jung's idea of the self and Lambert's writing on the agape factor in the therapist's personality. This may all sound heavy, but it does not read so, for the exposition is illustrated and brought to life by numerous case examples, which are sensitively discussed and applied. (The author's extensive use of case illustrations, fifty-one in all, is a feature of the book.) This chapter by itself will be of great value to those who have to interview and select candidates for pastoral training and employment.
The other chapters follow the same pattern, combining case material and theoretica