ABSTRACT
First, ‘intercultural therapy’ means different things – is it therapy between people of different cultural backgrounds, different ethnicities, or different skin colour? The term is used, often indiscriminately, for all of these. This chapter looks at ‘intercultural therapy’ as therapy conducted between two (or more) individuals who come from different cultural backgrounds: it explores what ‘different cultural backgrounds’ means in practice.
It uses clinical vignettes as examples: both individual one-to-one psychodynamic psychotherapy between the author, a middle-aged white British male psychotherapist, and a) a middle-aged white British male rough sleeper and b) a young Iraqi Muslim female computer scientist. The introduction briefly looks at what culture is, and what the relationship between an individual and her/his culture is; at how the individual and the social interact; and how the individual constructs meaning around themselves and how meaning is constructed around them within their cultural context(s). It suggests the individual specificity of culture within the psychotherapeutic context; then considers what ‘different cultural backgrounds’ mean in the light of this, and of these two clients’ relationships with the author and with their cultures.
Finally, it looks at some of the implications of this for how we think about and practise ‘intercultural’ therapy. It concludes with two questions: ‘Aren’t all psychotherapy relationships intercultural?’ and ‘Isn’t the therapy journey ultimately always intracultural?’
