Old Testament Essays (Dec 2020)

Healing the Wounded: The Psalms and Therapy

  • Christina Landman

Journal volume & issue
Vol. 33, no. 3

Abstract

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The dialogical spaces between the historicity of the written psalms and present experiences of suffering and loss are explored. It is found that the insights of Narrative Therapy resonate with the ways in which the psalmist(s) deal both with suffering and deliverance. This article describes how Ps 22 is used in training ministry students in the tenets of Narrative Therapy, and how Ps 46 functions in group therapy with women who have lost a child. The final section describes how the Psalms can serve – and have served – as intertexts in the therapeutic empowerment of people who are suffering because of a variety of losses. Here, the Psalms make an interdisciplinary landing between historical criticism and postmodernism, between tradition and experience. https://doi.org/10.17159/2312-3621/2020/v33n3a17