An intersubjective approach to cross‐cultural clinical work

Abstract

The cross‐cultural clinical encounter is fraught with anxieties, fears, biases, and misunderstandings that are experienced by both members of the therapeutic dyad. Through their articulation mainly within the intersubjective dimension of co‐experience, these subjective states, if unacknowledged by the dyad, can seriously impact, derail, and even prematurely truncate the treatment process.

This paper focuses particularly on the therapist's subjective state in the process of cross‐cultural clinical work, describing its dynamic action through what the author terms “the clinician's cultural countertransference. “This is a complex matrix of pre‐existing cognitions and affects about cultural groups that operates at multiple levels of consciousness within the therapist's psyche and can be communicated to ethnic clients at varied points of interpersonal and intersubjective contact. Substantial case illustrations are used to illuminate these dynamics, emphasizing both the therapist's culturally driven subjective experiences and mode of clinical intervention.

Notes

RoseMarie Perez Foster, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist and Associate Professor at the New York University Ehrenkranz School of Social Work. She is author of The Power of Language in the Clinical Process: Assessing and Treating the Bilingual Person (1998), Jason Aronson Publications.