Introduction

This book is organically grown. It simply grew out of my life as a Chinese-American clinical psychologist doing psychotherapy, training, reading, thinking, observing, and introspecting. For a long time these activities were carried out without any conscious unifying cultural frame of reference. To take one's cultural background into consideration in psychotherapy is a recent development, still in its infancy. It was simply not part of psychology's consciousness in the earlier years when I was in school and in training.