Robert Rocco Cottone

Robert Rocco Cottone (born January 28, 1952) is a psychologist, ethicist, counselor and poet and has been a professor in the Department of Counseling and Family Therapy at the University of Missouri–St. Louis since 1988, where he is a colleague of the social activist Mark Pope.

He is also the founder of the Church of Belief Science.

Academically, he is best known for his socially oriented theories of counseling and psychotherapy.

He attended Catholic grade school (Our Lady of Good Counsel) and later switched to public schools in the St. Louis suburbs, graduating from Hazelwood High School in 1970.

During the Vietnam War, he remained in the US and was a medic in the Air Force.

This was first accomplished in the field of vocational rehabilitation in the 1970s and 1980s with his "systemic theory of vocational rehabilitation".

Until that time, vocational rehabilitation was viewed primarily as a psychological or medical program.

He essentially developed a fully social model of vocational rehabilitation, meaning that individuals with disabilities are helped to fit within healthy and supportive relationship contexts (families, communities, cultures) rather than screened in or out of a rehabilitation program presumably on psychological traits or abilities.

Cottone later developed a "paradigm" framework for counseling and psychotherapy, a theory about counseling theories that emphasized that all counseling is a relationship between a client (or clients) and a counselor.

He argued that regardless of the treatment philosophy (which he classified broadly as the organic-medical, psychological, systemic-relational and social constructivism paradigms) a crucial element of counseling is the social process of consensualizing (coming to agreement about the nature of problems and the nature of solutions).

At the turn of the century, he developed a social constructivism model of decision making, which is a fully relational model.

By his model, decisions are made in the interpersonal processes of negotiating, consensualizing, and arbitrating (rather than an individual making a decision in his or her head).

His most recent effort has been to apply relationship theory to the study of religion.

He developed a relational philosophy of religion, providing a postmodern definition of belief: "acting with others as if some socially defined concept represents truth".

Accordingly, religious truths are imbedded within communities of believers and not as external universal truths.

His most compelling concept is a "bracketed absolute truth" or a "consensuality".

A bracketed absolute truth is unquestionably true to people in a community (e.g., a religious community or a group of mental health professionals), but to people outside of the community, the group's truth looks relative.

He used the example of the Heaven's Gate community, a religious group that committed mass suicide apparently without coercion.

The group members believed an alien spaceship followed the Hale-Bopp comet and was to clear the earth of humanity (recycling).

They committed suicide apparently so their spirits could rise up to the alien spaceship and escape the onslaught.

Cottone argued that the ideals of Heaven's Gate were bracketed absolute truths, which were powerful in affecting the behavior of adherents to the degree that group members took their lives in deference to "truths" that looked ridiculous to outsiders.

The idea of bracketed absolute truth (consensuality) explains how communities of believers (whether religious or not) hold fast to doctrine for better or for worse.

Finally, Cottone attempted to unite science and religion through relationship theory.

He defined science not as a process of establishing objective universal truths, but rather as a social process that reflects the culture, traditions and definitions of groups of scientists who (together) establish consensualities about how to practice science.

Science, consequently, is viewed as a process of relationships, as people come to believe together in the methods of defining scientific truths.

Therefore, science (physical or social), religion, or any belief system, is viewed as a result of interpersonal interaction.

Science and religion are thereby united at a high theoretical level as representing bracketed absolute truths.

He later attended the University of Missouri (A.B., clinical and counseling psychology, 1974; M.Ed., counseling, 1975) and the Saint Louis University (Ph.D., counseling and educational psychology, 1980).

Traditional counseling approaches are based on philosophies that attend to the individual experiencing emotional distress.

This emphasis dates back to Freud, who defined an individual "psyche" — an internal non-physical aspect of self that is the framework for dealing with conflicts within the personality.

Subsequent approaches to mental health primarily addressed individual problems as originating inside the person.

Cottone's contribution to counseling and psychotherapy, along with other social theorists, was to apply relationship theory (focusing on interaction between people) to processes that were previously viewed as largely non-relational or individual.

In the mid-1980s he developed a “systemic theory of vocational rehabilitation”, which constitutes the first comprehensive social theory of vocational rehabilitation.

He has been widely cited for his later work on advanced theories of psychotherapy, and he has been rated as having one of the highest publishing records among his peers.

His social theorizing advanced from that of social systems (in the 1980s Batesonian sense) to social constructions (in the 1990s and early 21st Century postmodern sense).

Cottone was born and raised in the post–World War II Italian-American culture in the suburbs of St. Louis, Missouri.

In his book, High Romance: A Book of Poetry, he describes his youth as "a story-book boyhood right from the pages of Mark Twain".

He rode his bike for hours to watch the barges at the Alton lock and dam, and he was enthralled with the Mississippi river.

He published his first book, Theories and Paradigms of Counseling and Psychotherapy, in 1992, which defined Kuhnian paradigms of mental health treatment.

He then developed a fully social model of decision making, the social constructivism model, taking decisions out of the head, so-to-speak, and placing them within the sphere of social discourse (c.f., consensus decision making).