What Have We Learned About the Interplay of Culture With Counseling and Psychotherapy?

In an early statement (Draguns, 1975), psychotherapy was construed “as a series of reinitiation techniques for reentry into a fuller, more efficient participation in society. Psychotherapy then is always a procedure that is sociocultural in its ends and interpersonal in its means; it occurs between two or more individuals, and is embedded in a broader, less visible, but no less real cultural context of shared social learning, store of meanings, symbols and implicit assumptions concerning the nature of social living” (p. 273). This characterization is also applicable to the related and overlapping operations of counseling. In fact, culture can be conceived as a third, invisible yet essential component in a counseling psychotherapy encounter (Draguns, 1975).