A portion of my decision to become a therapist was because of a grave sense of the dysfunction within the greater American culture. Depth psychology, the Jungian branch in particular, has an intrinsic understanding that individual change is the starting point for cultural change. Jung’s concept of the “unexpected third thing,” a unique and individual solution that individuals find by sitting in the uncomfortable place created by the tension of the opposites, brings not only an inherent sense of meaning, but also is the place of unique solutions to not only personal, but cultural problems.
Mary Watkins and Helene Shulman (2008) discuss this issue in their book Toward a Psychology of Liberation.
To the extent that depth practitioners identify with aspects of White American culture that are not conducive to psychological health, their treatment colludes with the very forces that cause distress. Insofar as psychology itself conserves the elisions of slavery and the Native American genocide, it contributes to the defensive structure of the American psyche, rather than to a radical movement that could help develop insight into the psychological legacy of these two founding tragedies. (p. 57)
I have found that the opportunity to work with a population that sees the world through a deeply different lens than the one that I inherited from my family and community has made me a more sensitive clinician, with a broader ability to hold uncomfortable subject matters with many different types of clients.
After reading an article by John Beebe (2004) entitled A Clinical Encounter with a Cultural Complex, my understanding of cultural complex within my clinical work deepened. Beebe shared a transcript from a session with a HIV positive gay male patient that illustrated how the culture helped form and shape internal dynamics that resulted in self-destructive behaviors and the patient’s subsequent death from the AIDS virus. Beebe was able to relate to this patient’s wounding at the hands of culture and community, and he reflected on the time in American culture where the culture was enacting the hero myth. Beebe and his patient were able to “see through [the myth]. They were able to
Assert with our anger that this is not me. In work on a cultural complex it is very important for the person to make this discrimination, to realize that he or she is in the grip (the way complexes always have on us, and not we them) of something that is finally ego-alien, derived from outside. Cultural complexes do not express the self, but rather the self the culture would like to impose on its members.
This understanding has helped me in the process of discriminating personally and clinically the source of internal inclinations.
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