ABSTRACT
All across the globe, tens of millions of people leave their native countries every year. There were three flows of immigration into the Netherlands after World War II. Ever since 2000, the Netherlands Psychoanalytic Institute (NPI, an ambulatory mental health clinic for psychoanalytic treatment and the training center of the Dutch psychoanalytic societies) has been devoting special attention to the psychoanalytic treatment of first and later generations of immigrants with an ethno-cultural minority position. For the client from a hierarchic society, the relationship with the therapist is often experienced in the model of the patient and the all-knowing doctor. This hierarchic model of the psychotherapy relationship can hardly be expected to fulfil the core therapeutic task of modern-day interactive and intersubjective psychoanalysis, i.e., to promote introspection and self-reflection by discussing and clarifying what is going on in the therapeutic relationship within the client as well as between the client and the therapist.
