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Intercultural Therapy: Challenges, Insights and Developments is a worthy successor to Intercultural Therapy (Kareem & Littlewood, 1992). It continues to examine the work done and emanating out of the Nafsiyat Intercultural Therapy Centre in North London. Founded by the late Jafar Kareem in the early 1980s the purpose of the centre was to offer accessible psychodynamic psychotherapy to ethnic minorities which was lacking from existing mental healthcare providers. It has managed to do so with great success providing a space for Black, Asian, Minority Ethnic, and Refugees to explore their internal and external worlds. It established, through Lennox Thomas and Roland Littlewood, an MSc in intercultural therapy at University College London and held numerous workshops and conferences on the impact of race and culture on the mental well-being of the world.
I found this book well written and researched with pithy chapters illuminating important themes that emerge when thinking about issues of race, culture, and ethnicity. The authors themselves, from differing psychological modalities and ethnicities, share aspects of their personal and clinical experience when working and thinking interculturally. I found it engaging, informative, and in some instances resonating with my own experience as a black man and therapist.
This past year has brought into focus an awareness of racial issues and injustice against the backdrop of a worldwide pandemic. Nafsiyat, amongst others, has been aware and worked to challenge that for many years prior. When you consider the previous decade's move to promoting nationalist movements and identity politics and its impact, the work still needs to continue. In chapter one Krause argues one of the consequences of neo-liberalism has been to erode notions of multi-culturalism. By focusing on individual self-sufficiency those who are different continue to be marginalised. Their ways of being and care are not recognised as it does not fit the Eurocentric mo