Psychotherapy and Traditional Healing for American Indians: Exploring the Prospects for Therapeutic Integration

Abstract

Multicultural advocates within professional psychology routinely call for “culturally competent” counseling interventions. Such advocates frequently cite and celebrate traditional healing practices as an important resource for developing novel integrative forms of psychotherapy that are distinctively tailored for diverse populations. Despite this interest, substantive descriptions of specific forms of traditional healing vis-à-vis psychotherapy have appeared infrequently in the psychology literature. This article explores the prospects for therapeutic integration between American Indian traditional healing and contemporary psychotherapy. Systematic elucidation of historical Gros Ventre healing tradition and Eduardo Duran's (2006) culture-specific psychotherapy for American Indians affords nuanced comparison of distinctive therapeutic paradigms. Such comparison reveals significant convergences as well as divergences between these therapeutic traditions, rendering integration efforts and their evaluation extremely complex. Multicultural professional psychology would benefit from collaborative efforts undertaken with community partners, as interventions developed in this manner are most likely to effectively integrate non-Western healing traditions and modern psychotherapy. © 2010, SAGE Publications. All rights reserved.