Culturally Competent Family Therapy

The problems of a family are often conditioned by the cultural issues its members face, regardless of their socioeconomic background. However, most therapeutic models ignore this important factor. Ariel's book offers a model for diagnosis and therapy that incorporates cultural issues. It provides clinicians and trainees with readily applicable concepts, methods, and techniques for helping families and their members overcome difficulties related to intermarriage, immigration, acculturation, socioeconomic inequality, prejudice, and ecological or demographic change. This approach enables therapists to analyze and describe a family as a cultural system, explain its culture-related difficulties, and design and carry out culturally sensitive strategies for solving these difficulties.The model introduced in this book integrates theories in family therapy in general and culturally oriented family therapy in particular with ideas drawn from many other fields, such as cross-cultural psychology, psychiatry, anthropology and linguistics. The form of therapy presented in this book is integrative, drawing from traditional curing and healing techniques employed in folk psychotherapy and medicine, in addition to more conventional therapeutic models. Every technique is modified to be adapted to the cultural character of the family in question. This book is designed to be a handbook for clinicians and a textbook for students, trainees and researchers. It can be used as a guide for a complete independent method of family therapy and also as a source of ideas and techniques that can be incorporated selectively into other forms of therapy.

"A much needed volume that places the enterprise of family therapy squarely in the cultural context. Building on the author's earlier work in information processing models, Dr. Ariel provides the reader with an outstanding set of conceptual tools for enhancing family therapy practice in an increasingly ethnoculturally diverse world."-Ronald F. Levant Co-Author, Masculinity Reconstructed Dean, Nova Southeastern University Former Editor, Journal of Family Psychology, "In this book Ariel has promulgated a fascinating and clinically useful model for conducting culturally competent family therapy. This comprehensive volume could well become essential reading for those engaged in treating multi-cultural patient populations, as well as those teaching and supervising about this seminal issue in today's society."-Florence W. Kaslow Kaslow Associates, P.A., Palm Beach Gardens, FL President, Family Psychology Division of the American Psychological Association, "Sensitive, creative, and intellectually rigorous--a remarkable combination. Shlomo Ariel's treatment of culturally sensitive therapy addresses some of the most important and most neglected sources of dysfunction and healing in families."-Israel W. Charny Professor of Psychology and Family Therapy Hebrew University of Jerusalem Past President, International Family Therapy Association

SHLOMO ARIEL, a licensed expert and supervisor of clinical psychology and marital and family therapy, is the co-director of the Integrative Psychotherapy Center in Ramat Gan, Israel. He is also the Coordinator of Research and Academic Development at the Israeli branch of Lesley College, Boston, Massachusetts, a member of the faculty of the Program for Advanced Studies in Integrative Psychotherapy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel, and the chairperson of the Israeli Association of Psychotherapy Integration.