“Keeping Culture in Mind”: Relational Thinking and the Bedouin Community

ABSTRACT

Guided by Muriel Dimen’s conceptualization of keeping “culture in mind”, the current paper describes an effort to integrate relational psychoanalytic ideas with school psychology in a cultural minority group of Bedouin families in Israel. To this aim, we arranged a seminar on relational ideas for educational psychologists from different ethnicities. Four themes emerged along the course of the seminar, each representing a “meeting of the minds” between the concepts of relational theory and the Bedouin socio-cultural context: (1) reconsidering “subjectivity” and “intersubjectivity” in a traditional, patriarchal society, (2) the tension between shared mutuality and cultural norms of hierarchy and authority, (3) ethnic and political positions in transference-countertransference enactments, and (4) fantasies of sameness and difference. Our work calls for further discussions about the universality of relational theory and its capacity to positively address the needs of patients and therapists in diverse socio-cultural contexts.

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to express their deepest appreciation to Dr. Chana Ullman and Dr. Mitchell Becker for their professional mentorship throughout the project and their constructive and valuable comments on the manuscript. The authors would also like to thank the editor and two anonymous referees who kindly reviewed this manuscript and provided valuable feedback.

Notes

¹ The intifada was a sustained series of Palestinian protests against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

Additional information

Funding

This research project was supported by the IARPP Muriel Dimen Fellowship.

Notes on contributors

Ortal Slobodin

Ortal Slobodin, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist and a senior lecturer at the department of education, Ben-Gurion University, Israel. Her research focuses on socio-cultural aspects of human development and on culturally sensitive mental health services for diverse populations.

Sharon Ziv-Beiman

Sharon Ziv-Beiman, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist, faculty and head of “Mifrasim Institute for Psychotherapy Research and Training” at the Academic College of Tel Aviv-Yaffo. Dr. Ziv-Beiman is a former chair of the Israeli Relational Forum and served as a board member of IARPP between 2019–2018. Her research focuses on therapeutic technique from common factor perspective.