Family Traditions, Cultural Values, and the Clinician's Countertransference: Therapeutic Assessment of a Young Sicilian Woman

ABSTRACT

Despite recent advances in models and instruments to understand the role of a client's cultural background, clinical psychologists are not immune to implicit cultural biases that are potentially damaging to the therapeutic alliance. In this article, I present a Therapeutic Assessment with a young Sicilian woman conducted in a university-based student clinic in Italy. During the assessment, I assumed that because we were both Italians, my client shared my perspective (northern Italian) about family and individual values, which resulted in a therapeutic impasse when I responded on the basis of my individual and culturally shaped view of interpersonal and family relationships without appreciating important differences between my own and my client's microcultures. To overcome the impasse, I had to openly acknowledge such differences and reorient myself to my client's goals. I discuss the core processes involved in such a repair in the context of a cross-cultural psychological assessment.

Acknowledgment

I am thankful to Rodan Di Maria, PhD, at the Universitá di Palermo, Italy, for sharing his expertise of traditional Sicilian social and microcultural features.

Notes

¹ Readers coming from a psychoanalytic background might wonder why the term dissociation is used here instead of the more traditional concepts of repression and denial. I refer the reader to various chapters and articles by Allan Schore (e.g., Schore, 2009a, 2009b). Schore explained how a whole new body of neuropsychological, developmental, and trauma research supports the conclusion that most early-forming strategies for avoiding or minimizing painful affect states are due to dissociation, a natural result of disintegration of the right brain, rather than to later forming repression, which is associated with “left-hemispheric inhibition of affects generated by the right brain” (Schore, 2009b, p. 115). Bromberg (2006), Van der Kolk, van der Hart, and Marmar (1996), and other experts share this conclusion.