The hidden politics of healing: foreign dimensions and Domestic Practice

In a reversal of the usual flow of traffic, the author suggests that Western therapists (of all orientations including psychoanalytic) working with clients who do not display obvious differences from themselves should learn from what has been discovered in the practices of transcultural psychotherapy and also from the manner which psychotherapy has evolved in non-Western locales. A destabilization is sought of the distinction between and relations of ?foreign? and ?domestic?. Issues focused on include power dynamics in the therapy process, the limitations of Western models of individual, parent, family and society, training issues and questions of pluralism and integration within the field of psychotherapy. Throughout, the background is the ubiquitous linkage of psychology/psychotherapy and politics, an inter-penetration of apparently internal and apparently external worlds.