Multicultural Counseling in US Psychology

Revision with unchanged content. Within U.S. psychology, there has been a growing effort to develop empirically supported treatments for minority populations, more elaborate descriptions of specific cultural groups, and assessment tools to measure psychotherapists' cultural competence. Although multicultural counseling competence seems simply to point to a skill set consisting of knowledge, awareness and beliefs, embedded within it are a series of assumptions that remain widely unquestioned. Because these assumptions involve how we define the project of psychotherapy and more importantly how we define the individual, culture, identity and difference, they are in need of examination. This co-authored qualitative study examines the intersection of multicultural counseling competence and psychotherapists' investments in identity.