THE USE OF PSYCHODRAMA TO DIMINISH TRANS-CULTURAL DIST ANCE IN PSYCHOTHERAPY

Abstract

Since the end of the Second World War the number of foreign students, businessmen, scientists and scholars living in the United States for one to four year periods has increased dramatically. Separated from their native cultures and families, often under heavy work pressures, and relating in a foreign tongue, many of these foreign visitors develop psychiatric symptoms or frank psychiatric illness. When illness strikes, the therapist to whom they turn for help is often at a great disadvantage in treating his "foreign patient."

Several factors unique to the foreign patient's treatment situation tend to increase "therapeutic distance" and complicate the work of psychotherapy. Much of the difficulty may be related to the patient's own culturally based expectations of what therapy should consist of. For example, Morita therapy emphasizes bed rest, patient self-report by journal writing, therapist's author- ity, work, and an acceptance of what life brings-if it be anxiety, the Morita concept is that acceptance will handle it perfectly.1 Leonhard, writing of the expectations of German patients, says that such an approach is totally un- acceptable to that cultural group.2 German patients, he emphasizes, expect to manipulate the phenomonological world by tangible interventive means, relying heavily on physical activities, prescribed medications and organic therapies.