Pedersen, Paul Bodholdt (1936-)

Paul Bodholdt Pedersen, considered by most psychologists to be the founder and major contributor to multicultural psychology and cross-cultural counseling and psychotherapy, was born on May 19, 1936, in Ringsted, Iowa. Located in a rural farming community in northern Iowa near the Minnesota border, the tiny community of Ringsted provided Pedersen with a strong, stable set of values that encouraged hard work, kindness, spirituality, generosity, compassion, and a respect for all living things. His family and community members were deeply religious; thus, many of his cherished childhood memories mirrored his experiences in the local Danish church. Pedersen traced his deep respect and appreciation for humanistic-spiritual perspectives to his family and community members of Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish ancestry. Much of his youth was spent working on the family farm in a secure family-centered environment. Pedersen's parents were avid collectors of books and placed a high premium on reading and music. Although his father and sister were accomplished musicians, Pedersen struggled to master the violin. After 7 years of lessons, he put the violin aside and turned his interests to reading as many books as he could find.

After graduating high school, Pedersen enrolled in Grand View Junior College in Des Moines, Iowa, and completed his Associate of Arts degree in 1956. He transferred to the University of Minnesota and graduated in 1958 with a concentration in history and philosophy; in 1959, he earned a Master of Arts degree in American Studies at Minnesota. Following his [Page 1259]interests in religious studies, Pedersen received a Master of Theology degree in 1962 from the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago. Then, in 1966, Pedersen earned a Master of Science degree in counseling and student personnel psychology from the University of Minnesota. In 1968 Pedersen received his Ph.D. in Asian Studies, with a concentration in the fields of counseling, cultural history, comparative religion, and political theory, from Claremont Graduate School in Claremont, California. His doctoral dissertation was titled Religion as the Basis of Social Change Among the Bataks of North Sumatra, adapting the 500-item Church Youth Research Inventory to Chinese and Malay/Indonesian languages.

Pedersen's abiding interests and commitment to promoting the importance of culture in psychology were sparked by his early travels hitchhiking across Europe and his academic appointments, beginning in 1962 as a visiting lecturer in ethics and philosophy and the chaplain at Nommensen University in Medan, Sumatra, Indonesia. He studied Mandarin Chinese full-time in 1968 in Taiwan. From 1969 to 1971, Pedersen was a part-time visiting lecturer in the Faculty of Education at the University of Malaya; also, he was the youth research director for the Lutheran Church of Malaysia and Singapore. While in Indonesia and Malaysia, Pedersen quickly realized that what he had learned about conventional counseling approaches at the University of Minnesota and Claremont Graduate School did not accommodate the worldviews of Malaysians, Chinese, and Indonesians. The daily dose of rich deep cultural experiences combined with the challenges associated with understanding culturally unique life-ways and thought-ways quietly planted the seeds for his plans to develop, advocate, and promote the value and significance of considering cultural differences in the counseling and clinical psychology professions.

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