Building multicultural counselling bridges: The holy grail or a poisoned chalice?*

*Keynote paper, Life-Achievement Award in multicultural Psychology, University of Toronto, June 27–28 2005.

Abstract

The paper examines the arguments related to contemporary notions of multiculturalism, including the ethical dilemmas involved in multicultural counselling. The paper argues that the present proliferation of untried, untested, and unreliable counselling theories in Western countries is inimical to the construction of genuine multicultural counselling bridges. It advocates the abandonment of such theories. It offers a model, which combines Eastern (mainly Indian) and Western approaches, and with judicious use it would enable counsellors and psychotherapists to cross cultural boundaries, construct more multicultural counselling bridges, and work in tandem. However, for the counselling theories to have substance, meaning, and validity, it is indispensable that the theories subscribe to an objectivist epistemology, instead of the subjectivist epistemologies into which most of them have lain so far. The differences and distinctions between subjectivist and objectivist epistemologies are clearly articulated. Finally, it is argued that counsellors and therapists must keep searching for valid multicultural counselling theories in the hope of discovering the Holy Grail of multicultural counselling and discard the poisoned chalice, by which many of the present theories appear to be contaminated.

*Keynote paper, Life-Achievement Award in multicultural Psychology, University of Toronto, June 27–28 2005.

Keywords:

• multiculturalism
• counselling
• epistemology
• subjective and objective knowledge
• ethics

Notes

*Keynote paper, Life-Achievement Award in multicultural Psychology, University of Toronto, June 27–28 2005.