Family Therapy

Universalist Perspective

Family therapists are commonly trained from a universalist perspective, the primary approach promoted by family therapy theorists and clinicians in the 1960s and 1970s. The universalist approach emphasizes the commonalities of different ethnicities, races, social classes, religions, genders, and sexual orientations and may elevate only those themes that are prevalent in the existing social order and context. The broad view of a universalist perspective has the potential of glossing over the sociopolitical sources of a family's problems and simply constructing problemsolving strategies that are compatible with the goals of the dominant culture. From a universalist perspective, culture may become merely another variable to influence family therapy rather than a contextual framework that qualitatively affects its total processes and outcomes. Critiques of the universalist perspective of families claim that a family therapist can limit one's knowledge of families by categorizing the family engaged in mental health treatment into broad general stereotypes, which can suppress an authentic human reality.

Culture-Specific Perspective

Culture-specific approaches to family therapy affirm both the client's cultural identity and human worth by emphasizing simultaneously the characteristics of the individual and unique aspects of cultural group membership. The goal of the culture-specific approach to family therapy is to decrease negative stereotyping by generating a more complex rather than simplistic understanding of the family and therapeutic interventions useful to the family. The importance of human differences and recognizing cultures is acknowledged by recognizing that mental health and illness, and therapeutic interventions, are defined by a specific community and society.

In a culture-specific perspective, interpretations of family behaviors are not based solely on values and prevailing norms of industrialized Western Europe and the United States. These norms frequently ignore the political and historical realities of nondominant cultures. Instead, from a culture-specific perspective, important human conditions such as power, historical self-consciousness, and transformation are crucial elements to acknowledge and challenge in family therapy. In addition, family therapists recognize that therapeutic interventions are often used as tools to control and exert power. For example, questions asked by a family therapist can be a deceptive guise to acquire information for constructing an ethnocentric interpretation. Determining who asks and answers them, directly or indirectly, requires one person to exert control and power over another. Similarly, a culture-specific approach emphasizes some of the inequalities that persist across genders and sexual orientations.

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