Relationality, Intersubjectivity, and Culture: Experiences in a Therapeutic Discourse of Virtual Kinship

Abstract

The contextual vision of relational therapies needs to expand beyond the therapeutic dyad to include the cultural context and the indigenous beliefs and practices that can impact on the relationship. An example of this claim is the “virtual kinship” discourse common in some sectors of Turkish society, which involves the use of a kinship idiom in interactions with nonkin, especially across class and gender lines, so that an implicit code governing social reciprocities in actual kinship relations can be invoked. This article provides clinical examples of its use by patients who differ in class and gender from the therapist. Also discussed are the impact of the discourse on the therapist and the way in which the discourse serves to create an intersubjective space for the cocreation of therapeutic meaning.

Notes

¹Clearly race and ethnicity are other important contextual factors, but my recent experience with them has been more limited.

²The latest issue of Family Process mentions both liminality and communitas in reference to “Psychotherapy as a rite of passage” (Beels, 2007), which confirms my belief that we therapists have much to learn from anthropology.

³This would seem to be the protoypical Western experience of relationships between strangers. However the Hegelian paradox of master and slave in Western thinking indicates that there are liminalities here as explored by Benjamin (1995).