Transcultural issues in family therapy

Abstract

Family therapists are influenced by the cultural conditioning of their groups. The cultural differences in shared assumptions and prescriptive rules sometimes lead to incongruent messages being given to families from a different culture. Some recurrent areas of difficulty in work with ‘ethnic’ families include the role of culture bound symptoms and family structures that do not conform to Western nuclear family norms. Case material is presented to illustrate practical guidelines in work with ‘ethnic’ families. Copyright © 1984, Wiley Blackwell. All rights reserved