ABSTRACT
In our view a sensitivity to issues of race, culture and context are essential to an effective and ethical psychotherapy. We would also include here an awareness of the client's personal and extended family history as this comes into the room. Many clients are carrying the effects of inter-generational trauma or cross-generational scripting into their present relationships which may lie at the root of much of their present experience in the world (Rupert, 2008). At a broader level, we are aware of the pull towards individual and psychological reductionism in psychotherapy, with an overemphasis historically on the intrapsychic at the expense of the social. The rise of humanistic psychotherapy has also been driven in part by an individualistic reductionism that fosters the myth that individuals are separate autonomous beings, capable of making independent choices unconnected with historical, social or political factors. Such idealism does not take into account the constraining effects of poverty, lack of educational opportunities, class struggles or structural inequalities in our society. Under many conditions the idea of individual agency just cannot be assumed. Furthermore, as Pilgrim (1997) points out `because the siting of psychotherapeutic encounters is typically and deliberately on the therapist's territory, all personal accounts given are disconnected, at least spatially, from the client's everyday context' (pp. 17±18). He goes on to point out that key innovators in the development of psychotherapeutic thinking and practice have been dubbed by feminist critics as DWEMs ± Dead, White European Males! It is noteworthy also that issues of race and culture have not been directly addressed in mainstream literature on different theoretical orientations in psychotherapy. It has taken a separate critical ®eld to give these issues the attention that they deserve (e.g. Lago, 1996; Littlewood and Lipsedge, 1997; Kareem and
body size, `thick' description (Geertz, 1975) of any case material in psychotherapy needs to include both an individual and a social/contextual perspective and that psychotherapists need to be open to re¯ect critically on their work in a way which challenges the potentially oppressive aspects of this profession (Dhillon-Stevens, 2005). This includes an openness to re¯ect critically and also sensitively with clients.
