Multi(ple) cultural voices speaking “Outside the Sentence” of counselling and psychotherapy

Abstract

This paper examines the notion that marginalized clients through their socio-cultural and geo-political histories are positioned “outside” the masculine cultural metaphors and conventional theoretical epistemologies of counselling, psychology and psychotherapy. In other words, these minoritized clients are “outside the sentence” of the texts and contexts of therapy. The discursive practice of therapeutic reconstitution and restoration produces a particular set of vocabularies and sentences that facilitate transformation and psychic equilibrium consistent with the process of individuation and self actualization. However, for marginalized groups, such as black and other visible minority, women, deaf, gay and lesbian clients the hegemonic masculine narratives of counselling psychology and psychotherapy only make it possible for these clients to be “outside the sentence”, not just grammatically and metaphorically of the therapeutic project, but in the external reality of how the practice is clinically governed. In other words, the social and cultural marginalization outside the clinic room is in a dialectical relationship with the therapy dyad. For the minoritized client being “outside the sentence” produces the effect of being “inside” another process, i.e., the history of subjugation, domination, diaspora, and displacement. This paper explores this issue and argues that the only way for counselling, psychology and psychotherapy to bring the diversity client “within the sentence” of therapy is to assign and re-inscribe the history, memory and pain of “the Other” voices to the “inside” of the therapeutic space, to interrupt and disrupt the hegemonic masculine narratives, thus transforming “non-sentences” into sentences and paragraphs, and eventually into essays of the discursive subject.