Brain Drain - Hochschule der Bundesagentur für Arbeit

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1.2 Unit 1: The Concept of “Culture” in Transnational and Multicultural
Counselling
We should start with some theoretical aspects and concepts in order to provide a
comprehensive review of the presented theme.
Multicultural counselling may be discussed in the perspective of stimulating
transnationality in the European idea sense on one hand and on national level in
regard with helping people from ethnic minorities on the other hand. This type of
counselling includes work with wide variety of ethnical, national, religious and socials
groups of people.
If we consider the “culture” concept in global sense it will include demographic
variable quantities such as age, gender, place of residence, status variable quantities
such as stratum belonging, educational level, income, belonging to formal and
informal groups as well as ethnographic variable quantities such as nationality,
ethnical origin, language and religion. Thus the multicultural idea is fundamental for
all relations in counselling. Pedersen (1991, p. 7) pleads for using the comprehensive
culture concept because this is the only way the counsellor can adapt to the variety of
clients from different groups and nationalities. In this sense multiculturism is not only
a method but also an independent theory which in terms of counselling is designated
as the “fourth power” together with psychodynamic, humanistic theory and
behaviourism although the multicultural approach in counselling is relatively new.
Based on Sue et al. understanding that multicultural („cross-cultural”) is every relation
in counselling in which two or more participants differ from each other in their cultural
inheritance, value system and lifestyle, Speight and others (1991, p. 32) offer a new
definition of the concept. They consider the theory of the historical perspective of
individuals as optimal. Accordingly, the multicultural counselling should correspond to
the meeting point of cultural specificity, individual uniqueness and human universality
rather than being oriented almost entirely towards cultural specificity as it was until
very recently. The figure below illustrates this new definition of counselling ideology:
a) each person is the same as all the others; b) the individual looks like the other
people in the group; �) each person is unique.
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