Multiculturalism as a fourth force

Paul Pedersen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135825355
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Psychothérapie

Until recently the field of psychology has been a monocultural science in a Euro-American envelope. Profound global changes in social, economic, political, and academic development have resulted in a more multicultural perspective for psychology. The field of psychology is now growing more rapidly outside than inside the U.S. As a result of these changes, multiculturalism adds a dimension to psychodynamic, humanistic, and behavioral psychology as much as the fourth dimension of time adds meaning to three dimensional spaces. The contributors to Multiculturalism as a Fourth Force seek to separate what we know from what we do not yet know about the importance of multiculturalism to these changes in the field of psychology. Topics include cultural diversity within and between societies, multiculturalism and psychotherapy, and culture centered interventions. Each contributor describes the need for multiculturalism in psychology, the difficulties in establishing a multicultural perspective and what has to happen before multiculturalism can claim to be a Fourth Force to supplement the other forces for psychology. In addition, the contributors examine the role of culture to the changing field of psychology and provide case examples of this phenomenon. It is the author's hope that by making culture central rather than marginal in the area of psychology, the psychodynamic, behavioral and humanistic theories can become more effective and less culturally biased.

PART

I

THE GENERAL ISSUES OF MULTICULTURALISM AS A FOURTH FORCE

1

CHAPTER

Paul Pedersen

Culture-centered Interventions as a Fourth Dimension of Psychology

A “fourth force” or dimension of psychology is emerging from a variety of contrasting perspectives in the social sciences. This fourth alternative is characterized by an inclusive nature that goes beyond the psychodynamic, behavioral and humanistic perspectives and is best described by cultural metaphors. A broad definition of culture which includes all salient features of personal identity provides a psychological construct adaptable to contemporary theories of counseling and psychological intervention. The advantages of a culture-centered perspective as a fourth-force alternative are identified and discussed in this chapter.

Culture is emerging as one of the most important and perhaps one of the most misunderstood constructs of contemporary theories of psychology. Culture may be defined narrowly, limited to ethnicity or nationality; or broadly, to include any and all potentially salient ethnographic, demographic, status, or affiliation identities. There are hundreds of working definitions for the culture construct which contrast with and sometimes contradict one another (Berry, Poortinga, Segall, & Dasen, 1992; Pedersen, 1990; 1997). At the same time, the fundamental importance of cultural constructs in psychology are clearly documented.

If each behavior occurs in a cultural context then all theories of human behavior are fundamentally, but usually implicitly, cultural theories. Attempts to accurately assess, meaningfully understand, and appropriately change behaviors without regard for their cultural contexts are misguided, naive, and dangerous. A culture-centered perspective provides a “fourth dimension” to the psychological interpretation of human behavior which gives additional meaning to psychodynamic, humanistic, and behavioral interpretations much as the fourth dimension of time gives meaning to three dimensional space. The culture-centered perspective is not intended to displace or compete with the other psychological perspectives but rather to complement them by framing them in the cultural contexts where all psychological interpretation occurs.

Segall, Dasen, Berry, and Poortinga (1990) affirm that ecological forces are the prime movers and shapers of cultural forms which in turn shape behaviors: “…given these characteristics of culture, it becomes possible to define it simply as the totality of whatever all persons learn from all other persons” (p. 26). Cultural psychology presumes that every sociocultural environment depends on the way humans give each cultural context meaning and are in turn changed in response to that sociocultural environment. Cultural psychology studies the ways cultural traditions and social practices regulate, express, and transform people in patterned ways. “Cultural psychology is the study of the ways subject and object, self and other, psyche and culture, person and context, figure and ground, practitioner and practice live together, require each other, and dynamically, dialectically and jointly make each other up” (Shweder, 1990, p. 1).

A culture-centered perspective introduces a new paradigm for psychology. Smith, Harre, and Van Langenhove (1995) contrast the new with the old paradigms in psychology. The new paradigms emphasize: understanding and description more than measuring, counting, or predicting; meaning rather than causation or frequencies; interpretation rather than statistical analysis; language, discourse, and symbols rather than reduction of data to numbers; holistic rather than atomistic perspectives; particu-larities rather than universals; cultural context rather than context-free perspectives; and subjectivity as well as objectivity.

The Development of a Fourth Dimension in Psychology

To the extent that culture in addition to ethnographic categories also refers to broadly defined social systems, variables of demographic, status and formal or informal affiliation, then a culture-centered dimension of all psychological theory emerges as a fourth dimension. According to the broad definition of culture, the underlying principle of a culture-centered perspective is to emphasize both the culture specific characteristics which differentiate and the culture-general characteristics which unite. The accommodation of both similarities and differences provides a complementary and comprehensive context for psychological understanding.

The notion of a fourth force is not new. Tart (1975) described the position of transpersonal psychology as a “fourth force” based on the spiritual revolution in modern society. The transpersonal psychologists suggested that their “fourth force” provided an alternative to scientific psychology. Transpersonal psychology was the first of many psychological perspectives to call attention to an emerging fourth alternative to the three prevailing psychological theories.

Mahoney and Patterson (1992) suggest that counseling and perhaps all psychology is at a “pivotal period” in which the rules are being changed in ways that we are only beginning to appreciate. The early history of psychology began with psychoanalytic theory as the first force of psychology emphasizing belief in the power of unconscious forces, biological impulses, and other internal processes of a client which determine behaviors. The second force began as a revolution toward positivism and objectivity as the explicit ideals of the scientific psychology of behaviorism. This changed the focus from the unconscious to behaviors which can be directly observed. Later, the third force of existentialism in Europe, and humanism in the U.S., with its positive view of human nature, emerged. This perspective, usually combined with phenomenological/experiential elements, saw clients as interactive and interdependent with environmental factors. Mahoney and Patterson (1992) claim that a fourth force cognitive revolution emerged in the late 1950s and 1960s as an interdisciplinary perspective in which human behavior is described as reciprocal and interactive rather than linear and unidirectional.

Other psychologists discuss the emergence of a fourth force without mentioning culture. Wrightsman (1992) describes how the perspectives of behaviorism, psychoanalysis, and humanism are supplemented by a “fourth alternative” based on George Kelly’s personal construct theory. Wrightsman describes this new movement as more collectivistic, resembling non-Western indigenous psychologies. “We are living in a time when the conventional wisdom about human nature and the nature of society is under attack. Technology has run amok; many now question our ability to bring technology under manageable control. Bureaucracy—a social structure originally established to provide for person growth—now stifles human development and generates a philosophy that human nature is lazy, irresponsible and extrinsically motivated. The communal movement has challenged a pessimistic drift in our society. Through study of the movement’s assumptions, aims, procedures and outcomes, we may gain an understanding of the future of philosophies or human nature” (Wrightsman, 1992, p. 293).

Culture provides a convenient construct to describe the complex and dynamic changes in psychological thinking which are redefining the rules of psychology. The new rules advocate tolerance of ambiguity rather than reductionism, multidimensional reality rather than unidimensionalism, the validity of subjective as well as objective evidence as proof and the validity of qualitative as well as quantitative methods for psychological research (Smith, Harre, & Van Langenhove, 1995).

Psychology in the near future promises to become a culture-inclusive science, that is, a science that routinely takes cultural variables into account (Berry, 1996). In contrast, psychology has routinely neglected and underestimated the power of cultural variables. Soon there will appear in connection with many psychological theories and methods a series of questions: “Under what circumstances and in which culturally circumscribed situations does a given psychological theory or methodology provide valid explanations for the origins and maintenance of behavior? What are the cultural boundary conditions potentially limiting the generalizability of psychological theories and methodologies? Which psychological phenomena are culturally robust in character, and which phenomena appear only under specified cultural conditions?” (Geilen, 1994, p. 38).

This multidimensional theory of cultural relationships accommodates both the perspective of cultural relativism and a universalistic perspective. The universal explanation of human behavior more frequently associated with the discipline of psychology is based on Nomothetic truth in the aggregate and lends itself to quantitative analysis across individual cases. The relativist perspective, more frequently associated with the field of anthropology, describes the ideographic truth of the particular instance but does not lend itself to generalizations across instances. The culture-centered perspective seeks to combine anthropological and psychological perspectives for a more balanced and comprehensive interpretation of human behavior than either discipline can provide separately.

There has been some controversy between those supporting cross-cultural psychology and those supporting cultural, transcultural, multicultural, or intercultural psychology, and other descriptions of the relationship between culture and psychology. These disagreements have been a distraction to the genetic application of culture to psychology.

Much has been made recently of the relatively small differences in approaches to the study of relationships between culture and behavior. I believe that the main goal of the field is to convince general psychology that culture is an important contributor to the development of human behavior, and to our understanding and study of it. I also believe that our combined efforts should be directed towards achieving this goal, rather than towards establishing claims of the correctness of one particular orientation over another (Berry, 1996, p. 96).

A multicultural counseling theory (Sue, Ivey, & Pedersen, 1996) is needed to provide a conceptual framework that recognizes the complex diversity of a plural society while at the same time suggesting bridges of shared concern which bind culturally different persons to one another. The ultimate outcome of a multicultural theory, as Segall et al. (1990) suggest is a contextual understanding. “There may well come a time when we will no longer speak of cross-cultural psychology as such. The basic premise of this field—that to understand human behavior we must study it in its sociocultural context—may become so widely accepted that all psychology will be inherently cultural” (p. 352).

The notion of culture is not new to psychology. Cross-cultural psychology has been an established area of psychology for nearly half a century. Cross-cultural psychology has more often been described as a method than as a theory. To the extent that “culture” refers exclusively to narrowly defined ethnographic categories such as nationality, race, or ethnicity, then cross-cultural psychology might indeed best be considered to be a method of analysis. The methods of cross-cultural psychology have usually applied to understanding the encounter of specific cultural groups with one another, while emphasizing the culture-specific categories of each group.

This trend toward cultural identification is not limited to the field of psychology. Huntington (1993) has described a “change in the rules” of national and international political engagement. In his opinion, a clash of deep seated ethnocultural differences will become more important than will nationalism for understanding the science of political conflict in the future. There is a pervasive awareness of cultural similarities and differences in the social sciences today which is changing the rules in ways that will require a rethinking of established theories of human behavior.

Two contrasting definitions of culture have emerged. One views culture as the values, beliefs, norms, rationalizations, symbols, ideologies, and other “mental products” which provide descriptive categories. The other views culture as the total way of life of a people including their interpersonal relations as well as their attitudes. The broad and more inclusive perspective of culture is emerging as the preferred perspective (Thompson, Ellis, & Wildavsky, 1990). Berry et al. (1992) point out the implications of a broad and inclusive perspective in an interdisciplinary study of behavior from multiple perspectives. “Thus in our frame of reference we need to avoid reducing culture to the level of psychological explanations, of psychological phenomena to biological explanations, biological to chemical, and so on. That is, we must recognize that there are, for example, cultural phenomena that exist and can be studied at their own level” (p. 6).

Definitions of cultural identity depend on a broad definition of culture. By defining culture broadly, to include demographic (e.g., age, gender, place of residence, etc.), status (e.g., social, educational, economic, etc.), and affiliation (e.g., formal and informal) variables as well as ethnographic variables of nationality and ethnicity, the construct of culture becomes generic to all counseling relationships in context. The narrow definition of culture has limited culture to what might more appropriately be called ethnographic relationships between groups with a shared sociocultural heritage and history. Ethnicity and nationality are important cultural variables but they are not unidimensional. The broad definition of culture includes the many within-group variables in a multidimensional description of cultural identity.

Attempts to describe cultural identity as unimodal or unidimensional rather than orthogonal (Berry, 1970, 1980; Oetting & Beauvais, 1991) have led to glossing over within-group differences and imposing a pseudo cultural identity on those with simultaneous membership in more than one culture at the same time. The five most used alternative models of identity are less complex. The dominant majority model simply imposes a dominant culture as an approp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• PART I THE GENERAL ISSUES OF MULTICULTURALISM AS A FOURTH FORCE
• PART II PARTICULAR ISSUES: PRODUCTIVITY WITHIN THE MULTICULTURAL PERSPECTIVE
• Index