Culturally Competent Family Therapy

Shlomo Ariel

The problems of a family are often conditioned by the cultural issues its members face, regardless of their socioeconomic background. However, most therapeutic models ignore this important factor. Ariel's book offers a model for diagnosis and therapy that incorporates cultural issues. It provides clinicians and trainees with readily applicable concepts, methods, and techniques for helping families and their members overcome difficulties related to intermarriage, immigration, acculturation, socioeconomic inequality, prejudice, and ecological or demographic change. This approach enables therapists to analyze and describe a family as a cultural system, explain its culture-related difficulties, and design and carry out culturally sensitive strategies for solving these difficulties.The model introduced in this book integrates theories in family therapy in general and culturally oriented family therapy in particular with ideas drawn from many other fields, such as cross-cultural psychology, psychiatry, anthropology and linguistics. The form of therapy presented in this book is integrative, drawing from traditional curing and healing techniques employed in folk psychotherapy and medicine, in addition to more conventional therapeutic models. Every technique is modified to be adapted to the cultural character of the family in question. This book is designed to be a handbook for clinicians and a textbook for students, trainees and researchers. It can be used as a guide for a complete independent method of family therapy and also as a source of ideas and techniques that can be incorporated selectively into other forms of therapy.

Foreword by Florence KaslowAcknowledgdmentsIntroductionCulture and Family Therapy: An OverviewThe Necessity to Incorporate Culture into the Theory and Practice of Family TherapyThe General Model of Culturally Competent Family Therapy:A Brief OutlineFamily-Cultural Concepts Relevant to Diagnosis and TreatmentThe Family's Conceptualization of Its EnvironmentThe Family's Cultural IdentityThe Family's Functioning and LifestyleThe Family's Coping with Problems and DifficultiesThe Information-Processing FrameworkThe Family as an Information-Processing SystemCulturally Determined Family DysfunctionCulturally Competent Family DiagnosisData-Collection Instruments and ProceduresAnalysis of Diagnostic DataTherapyThe Therapeutic Alliance in Culturally Competent Family TherapyPlanning the Therapy: Strategies, Tactics and TechniquesThe Therapeutic ProcessEpilogueAppendixReferencesIndex