ABSTRACT
Counsellors' perspectives on how the issues of race and culture affect counselling. psychology and psychotherapy were explored in this phenomenological inquiry by distributing questionnaires to 108 co-researchers - all the staff and students of one multicultural counselling and psychotherapy training organisation. It was left to the participants to choose the terms to describe themselves (within the context of this research) and thirty-one different self-descriptions emerged. Content analysis and frequency measurements were carried out on the data obtained in response to our inquiry about their experience of how the issues of race and culture affect counselling, psychotherapy and psychology. We identified five categories of statements: positive, negative, neutral ('it does not matter"), qualification ('it takes time') and a category we called 'unclear' (for those statements which were not possible to categorise).
Fifty-four per cent of statements concerned the positive influence or effect of cultural/racial issues on their experience, while 22 per cent were negative statements. Both positive and negative statements were then divided into subcategories according to the content of the statements. Six different categories for positive statements emerged: learning/understanding; commonality/individual differences; reparative/healing; positive emotion; experience of enrichment; and overcoming or awareness of prejudice. Four different categories of negative statements were found: experiencing counsellor's errors/mistakes; prejudice/ transference; feeling deskilled/competency issues; and inferior/bad feelings. This being a phenomenological study, we did not attempt to make any generalisation. However, it can be said that for the population we studied (which explicitly affirms the value of cultural difference and the integration of transpersonal dimensions with psychological counselling) racial and cultural influences were subjectively experienced distinctly as very positive as well as moderately negative.
