ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author begins to see an Aboriginal family in a child and family mental health service which was a good referral route, for the therapeutic mandate is clearer when an indigenous service is the first port of call. Reflection, and therapists’ reflexivity in the way they relate to their reflection the particular therapeutic relationship, and the particular social relationships within which they are embedded. Understandings of empathy that have been produced in the individual therapies tend toward practices that are more associated with the imagination of identification. The act of relating is simultaneously intensely social and intimately personal, and in intercultural relating there is a special complexity within the therapeutic relationship. Foucault generated ideas that spoke to the conditions of possibility of social discourse, and the power of social practices to generate the possibility of ways of thinking, and the spiral of practice and discourse in social process.
