Reaching Across Boundaries of Culture and Class: Widening the Scope of Psychotherapy

In a world that is forever fragmenting into divisions of ethnicity and class, this groundbreaking book offers an approach to therapy that reaches across the boundaries that usually divide us. Reaffirming psychotherapy's roots in a progressive approach to social change, the contributors show how contemporary methods can be used to treat patients often previously thought unresponsive to psychodynamic therapy. Cultural values, countertransference guilt, immigration, bilingualism, and battered self-esteem in African-American patients are among the many topics discussed. Numerous examples guide the clinician to a better understanding of the role of culture in the therapeutic relationship. A Jason Aronson BookIn a world that is forever fragmenting into divisions of ethnicity and class, this groundbreaking book offers an approach to therapy that reaches across the boundaries that usually divide us. Reaffirming psychotherapy's roots in a progressive approach to social change, the contributors show how contemporary methods can be used to treat patients often previously thought unresponsive to psychodynamic therapy. Cultural values, countertransference guilt, immigration, bilingualism, and battered self-esteem in African-American patients are among the many topics discussed. Numerous examples guide the clinician to a better understanding of the role of culture in the therapeutic relationship.

Table of Contents:
Chapter 1 Introduction Chapter 2 What is a Multicultural Perspective for Psychoanalysis? Chapter 3 The Social Conscience of Psychoanalysis Chapter 4 Psychoanalysis in an Historic-Economic Perspective Chapter 5 How Universal is the Psychoanalytic Self? Chapter 6 Psychodynamic Treatment with the Urban Poor Chapter 7 The African-American Patient in Psychodynamic Treatment Chapter 8 Working-Class Issues Chapter 9 Countertransference in Cross-Cultural Psychotherapy Chapter 10 The End of Analyzability Chapter 11 The Accommodation of Diversity in Psychoanalysis Chapter 12 Skin Color in Psychotherapy Chapter 13 In Search of Repressed Memories in Bilingual Individuals Chapter 14 Assessing the Psychodynamic Function of Language in the Bilingual Patient

About the Author :
RoseMarie Pérez Foster, Ph.D., is an associate professor at the NYU Ehrenkranz School of Social Work, a faculty member of the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, and a Clinical Instructor of Psychiatry at NYU Medical Center. Michael Moskowitz, Ph.D., is adjunct associate professor in the City University of New York Clinical Psychology program, a publisher at Jason Aronson Inc., and is in private practice in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in NYC. Rafael Art. Javier, Ph.D., is clinical professor of psychology and director of the Center for Psychological Services and Clinical Studies, St. John's University, Jamaica, New York.

Review :
This book is long overdue. It brings to the forefront the need to have a transcultural perspective in doing psychodynamic therapy. The authors demonstrate that the self-understanding offered through psychodynamic therapy is indeed accessible when practiced by culturally informed practitioners. All psychotherapists who practice in our multicultural society should read this book. This book is brave and ambitious, yet clearheaded. The editors and contributors understand that if psychoanalysis is to have any use or moral purchase in treating ethnic and class diversity in contemporary culture, it must recover and reaffirm its radical and social roots. A psychoanalytic theory and practice sensitive to issues of class, ethnicity, poverty, and economic and social suffering must be socially critical, self critical, and above all deeply psychoanalytic. A nice paradox: a theory sensitive to diversity and specific social crises yet committed to the universality of unconscious process, transference phenomena, and complex intrapsychic process as the source of illness and of healing. This book usefully highlights class and cultural dimensions, too often neglected in our literature, if not in our best practice. It has value as a significant extension of an inherently contextual methodology, neither revisionist nor necessarily inimical to its scientific aim.