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Georgene Seward demonstrated in her first volume, Psychotherapy and Culture Conflict, the importance of taking cultural factors into account when working with a member of a minority group. Without awareness of its cultural roots, a symptom may be inaccurately evaluated. Before interpreting the findings of psychometric studies one must consider regional basic differences in world outlook. A single example of this might be the response of Hopi Indian children to speed tests. Since the Hopi community looks with disfavor on most forms of competition, their children resist taking timed tests to determine who will finish first.
This book presents case histories of a variety of selected subcultures and successfully indicates how cultural conflicts operate on a person-to-person interaction. As the author herself notes, membership in a minority per se does not constitute a problem; rather, each problem is unique and quite personal. Seward has found that living in contact with a dominant social milieu has introduced specific and diffuse problems to all ethnic groups. Among the more diffuse she includes difficulties with identification, expression of emotion and behavior, ego defense systems, and moral controls.
The desire for upward social mobility— toward better jobs and higher status—was found to be an important drive among the typical minority group members struggling to identify with the dominant cultural stream. One group of problems arising from cultural discrepancies is experienced by new arrivals to this country. After that the problems arising in the second and subsequent generations occur on a variety of levels: between the minority group and “the others,” between the more orthodox and the more assimilated members of the same group, between members of a family unit, and between conflicting aspects of the intrapsychic patterns of identity.
She has observed that, in general, the more firmly a person has an identification with his primary in-group, the better integration