(Re)placing multiculturalism in counselling and psychotherapy

ABSTRACT

Since multiculturalism is not fully theorised it has created much confusion in counselling and psychotherapy. It has been criticised for ignoring questions of power relations, and for emphasising the cultural differences of ethnic minority groups rather than focus on their similar predicaments of racism, sexism, misogyny, homophobia and economic oppression. Furthermore, it has not provided clinically useful information within which therapists can conduct assessments and diagnosis, understand clients’ subjective distress and cure seeking expectations. This paper explores this issue by highlighting the magical (non)sense of multiculturalism and its racialised forms, and argues that multiculturalism is untenable if it restricts itself to a few marginalised ethno-cultural client groups, rejects gays and lesbians, patronises indigenous forms of healing, and maintains a fixed racialised ‘black–white’ paradigm of practice. It suggests that a point of departure for multiculturalism from an ethno-culturalism-centred philosophy to one that is pluralistic and reflexive of the needs of all clients (irrespective of ethnicised, racialised, gendered, and sexualised subjective identities) is critical if it is to be useful psychologically. To arrive at this critical juncture, multiculturalism would need to be (re)placed, not disavowed but re-centred in the practice of counselling and psychotherapy to embrace diversity and difference across and beyond the current categories that constitute itself. Replacing multiculturalism in a ‘third space’, an ‘in-between space’—a critical multicultural space—where dominant hegemonic cultural meanings could be reinscribed and where racism, sexism, misogyny, homophobia and other ‘representations of patriarchal terror’ could be critically interrogated to empower marginalised voices. The paper explores three strategies for creating a ‘third space’ in multicultural counselling and psychotherapy: the inclusion of white people as clients; the converging of race, gender, sexual orientation, class and disability issues; and the integration of indigenous and traditional healing practices. Bringing it all together under the umbrella of diversity or critical multiculturalism will ensure an ethical and clinical practice commensurate with our current understanding of the complexity and sophistication within which clients construct their subjectivity.

Notes

1. Also includes multiethnic, multiracial, multi-religious, multilingual, multi-class, multi-disability, multi-sexually oriented.

2. Frantz Fanon believed that only a psychoanalytic interpretation of the black problem could lay bare the anomalies that are responsible for the structure of the complex (Fanon, 1952, p. 10).

3. Ivey et al. (2002) discuss a similar argument by Clemmont Vontress, regarded as one of the ‘founding fathers’ of multicultural counselling (when interviewed by Courtland Lee in 1994). He says, ‘… during my years at Crispus Attucks High School as director of counseling, I learned from counseling students that the (client centered) approach wouldn't work for them’ (p. 254).

4. The Association for Multicultural Counseling and Development (AMCD) in 1991 approved 31 multicultural counselling competencies as the basis of good practice (see AMCD's website at www.amcd-aca.org for details of the 31 competencies).

5. Avtar Brah refers to the USA as an ‘Unmelting pot’ place, where the discourse of multiculturalism is singularly contradictory (Brah, 1996, p. 227).

6. Connell defines hegemonic masculinities as ‘the configuration of gender practice which embodies the currently accepted answer to the problem of the legitimacy of patriarchy, which guarantees (or is taken to guarantee) the dominant position of men and the subordination of women’ (Connell, 1995, p. 77).

7. Expression popularised by Chinua Achebe (1958) in his novel Things Fall Apart; line taken from the poem ‘The second coming’ by W. B. Yeats (1921).

8. Tariq Modood offers an interesting discussion on this issue in his paper ‘British Asian Muslims and the Rushdie affair’ (Modood, 1992).

9. Some would argue that the ‘black uprisings’ of the late 1970s and early 1980s in places like Brixton, St. Paul's, Chapeltown, and many other inner city districts resulted in this policy. The Rampton (1984), Swann (1985), Eggleston (1986) and Scarman (1986) reports followed; finally, resulting in Margaret Thatcher's government resourcing through Section 11 funding, black and ethnic minority access to education and training, as well as to university education (see Moodley, 1995). The state provides the resources for development of multiculturalism according to own rules, and thereby seeks to control black and ethnic minority development.

10. For example, the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) formed RACE (Race Awareness in Counselling Education) which remained active for about 20 years.

11. Sashidharan says, ‘Any black person being admitted to a mental hospital in England for the first time has a one-in-two chance of being diagnosed as schizophrenic although a native-born, white person receives a similar diagnosis in only one-in-six or seven admissions’ (Sashidharan, 1990, p. 8). While Littlewood acknowledges, ‘To be black in Britain today is to be exposed to a variety of adverse stimuli that can add up to a quite serious hazard to mental health’, the problem may be due in part to the ‘overtly racist politics where these exist’ and to ‘certain specific patterns of psychiatric intervention’ (Littlewood, 1992, p. 3; see also Burke, 1986; Fanon, 1952; Lewis et al., 1990).

12. Patricia Arredondo is the 2005–2006 president of the ACA (American Counseling Association).

13. Bonnett (1999) in exploring the historical geographies of whiteness argues that white identification has been shifting—he refers to David Roediger's historical studies—in 1992 and 1994—that explains how Jews, Irish, Italian immigrants in the US were initially not deemed to be white.