Guiles, Austin Philip.

Austin Philip Guiles (1894-1953) was born in Lawrenceville, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Princeton University in 1921, received his MA from Columbia in 1923, his BD from Union Theological Seminary in 1925, and his PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 1934. He was ordained as a Presbyterian minister in 1924 and became a Congregationalist in 1939. He married Louise Earhart in 1925, and served as pastor of Union Church, Palisade, New Jersey, from 1925 to 1927. In 1928 he began training for pastoral work with emotionally disturbed persons under the direction of Anton T. Boisen at Worcester State Hospital in Worcester, Massachusetts. Guiles was a key figure in the foundation of the Council for the Clinical Training of Theological Students in 1930, securing necessary funding for it through his father-in-law's Earhart Foundation. He appointed Helen Flanders Dunbar as executive director of this organization, and in 1932 Guiles withdrew from this council and started his own organization, the New England Group . This organization spawned the New England Theological Schools Committee on Clinical Training (1938) and the Institute for Pastoral Care (1944). These organizations were the major vehicles for the clinical pastoral education movement in New England, and Guiles was a key figure in creating and guiding them through their formative years. He was one of the first to employ the case study teaching method, which was based on the interaction between a student counselor and a patient within a hospital setting. This method was intended to help a counselor develop a "clinical theology" which could be empirically derived from clinical experience. This method is now standard in pastoral care and counseling training. In 1931 Guiles was appointed to the faculty of Andover Newton Theological School, becoming the first clinically trained person appointed to a theological faculty. Promoted to Smith Professor of Pastoral Psychology in 1934, Guiles devoted the rest of his career to the vision of integrating clinical studies into the core of the theological curriculum and developing clinical training programs for pastors throughout New England.

-from American National Biography Online, 2007

From the guide to the Papers, 1920-1953., (Andover-Harvard Theological Library, Harvard Divinity School)