How to Facilitate Sustainable Resilience: Wilhelm Stählin as a Model for Emotional Competence by Transformative Metaphors

Abstract How can the use of metaphors promote sustainable resilience in an educational process? How can educators and pastoral workers facilitate transformative learning by promoting strategies for coping with challenges? The paper answers these questions from a religious and psychological perspective by applying a biographical approach. By evaluating the research of Wilhelm Stählin, the founder of the Association and Archive for the Psychology of Religion in Germany in 1914, a model for facilitating emotional competence by transformative metaphors becomes obvious. Comparing this model with current concepts of resilience-oriented metaphor analysis facilitates further religious and psychological (and other) models for educational situations of transformative learning. Since in both situations (1914 and 2024) the question of war and peace is a major background challenge, the following evaluations have this need for resilience as a common framework. As transformative learning integrates individual biographies into a community-oriented attitude, personal and social aspects of resilience belong together. Therefore, Stählin’s research, combined with modern pastoral experiences (search for meaning, social integration) facilitates a multiplex analytical approach and the transformation of language, narratives, and rituals.