ABSTRACT
Family therapy is practised in a wide variety of social settings and, despite the diversity of ideas and approaches in practice, is firmly based on the concept that an individual's problems can be helped by treating the entire family as a unit. In doing so, the family therapist will generally reinforce what is considered to be competent family functioning and discourage patterns of behaviour that are dysfunctional. The therapist may, however, assess a patient using norms that stem from the Western European cultural matrix, and needs to recognise that the definition of a family is itself a cultural construction. In reviewing the points of tension in the interface between the Western-trained family therapist and the client 'ethnic' family, one would need to consider the following areas: differences in systems of symbolic meaning; differences in family structure and organisation; language and communication. Obviously, where language is a difficulty, a proper assessment of the family's needs and strengths then becomes very difficult.
