Intercultural Therapy

Intercultural therapy is a form of psychotherapy aimed at benefiting culturally diverse groups, recognizing the importance of race, culture, beliefs, values, attitudes, religion and language in a client's life. The concept was developed by Jafar Kareem in his book Intercultural Therapy (1992), which held that intrinsic differences exist between individuals in their biology, personality or both, and that both inter- and intrapsychic events profoundly affect an individual's psyche and develop as part of their unconscious life, with events of the external world experienced as real but also internalized. Responding to cultural variance identified by anthropology, an intercultural therapist must take a client's external realities into account, such as poverty, refugee status, racism, sexism, and physical health and ability; Kareem believed that failure to understand cultural issues can lead to major diagnostic and therapeutic errors. The approach recognizes that being from another culture involves conscious and unconscious assumptions in both patient and therapist, and that these unconscious assumptions can mean traditional therapy fails to address the needs of someone outside a dominant culture, or is not offered to them at all.