My life experience as a life-long New Yorker has been a continual ethno-cultural learning
experience, and not always for edification, but for survival as I lived
most of my life on New York City's Manhattan Island. Cross-cultural
interrelation is not an option there, success depends on it; and it is a
pretty much limitless number of cultures that are encountered.
(Recently I remember seeing a Chinese-language movie with another
Chinese language in the subtitles.)
Manhattan
has unquestionably been a multicultural success story at every
socio-economic level with no significant cultural or racial friction in
recent memory, the African-American civil rights struggle of the 60s-70s
being the last significant event that could be termed a struggle. (I
cannot say this is necessarily true for the other boroughs, such as
Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, or the Bronx, or nearby Connecticut or
New Jersey--I can only speak for my cohort.) I think it is a very good
question to ask why Manhattan has been uniquely culturally harmonious.
On the surface of it, I think that New York City's feminist (and other
gender-related movements such as GLBT rights) have provided guiding
influence. I get this "feeling" from my psychological and counselling
feminist reading (Collins & Arthur, 2007), where the writers have
shown male-female inequities and disparities, but have faithfully gone
on to look at underlying causes, which can then be applied generally to
resolve all inequities. The historical white-male dominance becomes
obvious if you try to quickly name a few famous psychologists or
psychiatrists. Only Satir comes instantly to my mind who was not male;
though Ruth Benedict who defined Synergy (in terms of First Nations) and
mentored Abe Maslow is never far from my mind, she was a sociologist
(Young, 2005).
For
me personally, a strong influence has been cultural appreciation of
culture, such as in art, music, and ways of life through museums.
Museums tend to work hardest at bringing culture to you, albeit as
scenes behind glass, and the scientists who brought that culture are the
anthropologists, ethnologists, and, to a degree, archeologists--whom I
have admired along with other sociologists who have leveraged their
material.
Since
starting at Yorkville, ethnology has shown itself to be the most useful
"other" discipline to apply to counselling in this context. By
definition, ethnologists are psychically nurtured by learning about
other cultures. Just as we are learning to self-monitor internal
functions such as transference, ethnologists learn to self-monitor bias
and integrate it into their research, and therefore their thinking
(Clark, 2000).
I
happened to click on an article about a murder of a hip-hop rapper in
Toronto on the Sun's website, and looked at the forum discussion. I
found a good number of posts that were anti-ethnic in nature if not
racist, and also a number of posts responding in critical but positive
ways. There is no question that therapists are concerned about this in
society outside of the privacy of therapy; both Rogers and Beck
committed much time to the topic, with Beck's Prisoners of Hate
(2000) coming to mind. Rogers left me with the impression that "we are
mostly normal people reacting to abnormal situations," such as cultural
and racial inequity (Evens, 2009; Rogers, 1978). I get hints from the
CPA's Code of Ethics (2000) and its supporting documents that we should be
activists in influencing how government should enforce policy, for
instance, by legally challenging unethical laws and rulings that erode
the the rights of the clients and hence their communities.
References
Beck, A. (2000). Prisoners of hate: The cognitive basis of anger, hostility, and violence. New York, NY: Perennial.
Bemister, T. B., & Dobson, K. S. (2011). An updated account of the ethical and legal considerations of record keeping. Canadian Psychology/Psychologie Canadienne, 52(4), 296-309. doi:10.1037/a0024052
Canadian Psychological Association. (2000). Canadian code of ethics for psychologists.
(3rd Edition). Ottawa, ON: Author. Retrieved
fromwww.cpa.ca/cpasite/userfiles/Documents/Canadian%20Code%20of%20Ethics%20for%20Psycho.pdf
Clark, J. (2000) Beyond Empathy: An Ethnographic Approach to Cross-Cultural Social Work Practice. Retrieved from http://www.mun.ca/cassw-ar/papers2/clark.pdf
Collins, S., & Arthur, N. (2007). A Framework for enhancing multicultural counselling competence.
Evens, S. R. (2009). Carl Rogers 1902-1987. Retrieved from personcentered.com/carlrogers1.html
Rave, E. J., & Larsen, C. C. (1995). Ethical decision making in therapy: Feminist perspectives. New York, NY: Guilford Press.
Rogers, C. (1978). Carl Rogers on personal power. New York: Dell.
Young, V. (2005). Ruth Benedict: Beyond relativity, beyond pattern. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.
No comments:
Post a Comment