ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book aims to help the psychotherapist who works with clients who are culturally and ethnically different from himself/herself to address the difficult issues and find an anti-discriminatory, non-ethnocentric, and ethical way of working cross-culturally. Therapeutic approaches that aim to address social and cultural issues must incorporate a systems view in some way. Societies, nations, or groups of people are made up of embodied individuals in multiple overlapping relationships in which meanings are expressed, reconstituted, or changed over time. It is impossible to have a theory about society which makes propositions only about individuals and not about their interaction and communication. The "family" is a cross-cultural idea even though the processes, functions, shapes, terms, and structures that are associated with this idea are not. The book argues that cultural questioning and self-reflection become integral to the ongoing practice and theorizing in family therapy.
