Short-Term Intercultural Psychotherapy: Ethnographic Inquiry‪.‬

The contemporary clinical environment is marked by two pronounced trends. First, in response to a variety of social and economic factors, short-term psychotherapies are delivered with increasing frequency in many mental health settings. Second, because of the growing cultural, ethnic, and racial diversity of the clientele who seek mental health services, and of the clinicians who provide them, intercultural treatments have become a more common clinical occurrence. The challenges of brief psychotherapies and of intercultural treatments have been discussed in the clinical literature in recent years, but they have been addressed separately. Despite the historic convergence of these two phenomena, the problems specific to treatments that are both short-term and intercultural have received insufficient attention. This article examines theoretical and technical frameworks that are applicable to short-term intercultural treatments. After discussing difficulties that are common to such treatments, the article describes clinical approaches that allow therapists to conceptualize and explore the psychic and cultural worlds of clients whose cultural and linguistic backgrounds differ from theirs. Three short-term intercultural case vignettes are presented to illustrate these new approaches.