2013 Culturally Sensitive Psychotherapy and Culture Analysis (original) (raw)

The role of culture and cultural techniques in psychotherapy: A critique and reformulation

American Psychologist, 1987

This article examines the role of cultural knowledge and culture-specific techniques in the psychotherapeutic treatment of ethnic minority-group clients. Recommendations that admonish therapists to be culturally sensitive and to know the culture of the client have not been very helpful Such recommendations often fail to specify treatment procedures and to consider within-group heterogeneity among ethnic clients. Similarly, specific techniques based on the presumed cultural values of a client are often applied regardless of their appropriateness to a particular ethnic client. It is suggested that cultural knowledge and culture-consistent strategies be linked to two basic processes--credibility and giving. Analysis of these processes can provide a meaningful method of viewing the role of culture in psychotherapy and also provides suggestions for improving psychotherapy practices, training, and research for ethnic-minority populations.

Culturally competent psychotherapy

Canadian journal of psychiatry. Revue canadienne de psychiatrie, 2003

To provide effective psychotherapy for culturally different patients, therapists need to attain cultural competence, which can be divided broadly into the 2 intersecting dimensions of generic and specific cultural competencies. Generic cultural competence includes the knowledge and skill set necessary to work effectively in any cross-cultural therapeutic encounter. For each phase of psychotherapy--preengagement, engagement, assessment and feedback, treatment, and termination--we discuss clinically relevant generic cultural issues under the following headings: therapist, patient, family or group, and technique. Specific cultural competence enables therapists to work effectively with a specific ethnocultural community and also affects each phase of psychotherapy. A comprehensive assessment and treatment approach is required to consider the specific effects of culture on the patient. Cultural analysis (CA) elaborates the DSM-IV cultural formulation, tailoring it for psychotherapy; it i...

Psychotherapy and the cultural concept of the person

2007

Abstract Psychotherapies are distinguished from other forms of symbolic healing by their emphasis on explicit talk about the self. Every system of psychotherapy thus depends on implicit models of the self, which in turn, are based on cultural concepts of the person. The cultural concept of the person that underwrites most forms of psychotherapy is based on Euro-American values of individualism.

Culture & Psychotherapy: Toward a Hermeneutic Approach

Despite the growing awareness of cultural differences and the challenges of multicultural counseling, critics have noted that understandings of culture within psychology remain largely cursory. Philosophical hermeneutics help to remedy this situation by offering a comprehensive theory of culture that (a) details how the self is embedded in culture, (b) highlights culture's inherently moral nature, and (c) shows how cultural conflict be can be mediated through dialogue. Hermeneutics provides a means of thinking interpretively about cultural meanings and discerning their specific manifestations. It can be utilized by psychotherapists not only to help understand clients from different cultural backgrounds but also to better recognize how the dominant Western cultural outlook-individualism-influences psychotherapy theory, research, and practice.

How does Culture Affect the Therapeutic Relationship between Therapist and Patient

The focus of this research is in the area of psychoanalysis investigating factors influencing psychotherapeutic relationship from psycho social perspective. Such a study is important in order to identify level of influences of culture involvement in therapeutic relationship. This research conducted to provide an evidence for mental health professionals to understand cultural background of mental discomfort.

Trans-Cultural psychotherapy - world journal Psychotherapy

Modern psychological and psychotherapeutic methods arose in Europe and America in the late 19th-early 20 centuries on the basis of «Western philosophy» that rooted in Renaissance. Historical, social and cultural development of Europe has enabled principles of individualism, democracy, socialism and equality. As a consequence, such concepts as self, self-realization, selfidentification, self-mastery and so on emerged and evolved in psychology.

Ten considerations in addressing cultural differences in psychotherapy

Professional Psychology: Research and Practice, 2003

As the United States population grows more culturally diverse, it is increasingly likely that psychologists will treat patients from dissimilar cultural backgrounds. Psychologists are often undecided about whether it is therapeutically appropriate to address cultural differences. Ten clinical considerations regarding the appropriateness of discussing cultural differences with patients are described. Examples are provided of how these suggested guidelines may apply to clinical practice. The literature that has supported addressing differences, including selected theoretical models, is cited in the context of these recommendations. All psychotherapy cases are distinct; therefore, these general guidelines should be adapted to the requirements of the individual patient. Theoretical Perspectives Cultural differences have been understood through three distinct perspectives: universalism, particularism, and transcendism (Se-MARTIN J. LA ROCHE received his PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Massachusetts at Boston. He is currently an instructor in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School at the Children's Hospital Boston/Martha Eliot Health Center and is in independent practice in the Cambridge, MA, area. His current areas of research are multicultural psychotherapy and health psychology. APRILE MAXIE received her PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Psychiatry at Kaiser Permanente in Oakland, CA. Her current area of research is cross-cultural psychotherapy and treatment-seeking in ethnic minority populations.

Culture and psychotherapy in a creolizing world

Transcultural psychiatry, 2006

call creolization the meeting, interference, shock, harmonies and disharmonies between the cultures of the world. .. [it] has the following characteristics: the lightening speed of interaction among its elements; the awareness of awareness: thus provoked in us; the reevaluation of the various elements brought into contact (for creolization has no presupposed scale of values); unforeseeable results. Creolization is not a simple cross breeding that would produce easily anticipated results.' (Edouard Glissant, 1997) The practice of psychotherapy depends on a fund of tacit knowledge shared by patient and clinician (Frank, 1973). Intercultural work challenges this shared 'assumptive world' and poses problems of translation and positioning, working across and between systems of meaning and structures of power that underpin the therapeutic alliance and the process of change. The encounter of patient and clinician from two different cultures is not simply a matter of confrontation or exchange between static systems of beliefs and values. Once viewed as self-contained worlds of meaning, cultures are now seen as systems of knowledge and practicesustained by cognitive models, interpersonal interactions, and social institutions-that provide individuals with conceptual tools for selfunderstanding and rhetorical possibilities for self-presentation and social positioning. Moreover, cultural worlds are open-systems, shaped by forces of migration, globalization, and hybridization (Hannerz, 1996; Papastergiadis, 2000). This flux destabilizes old values, identities and ways of life