Culture Therapy

CULTURE THERAPY

What this essay is not about: it is neither about ethnopsychiatry nor specifically about transcultural medicine as the term therapy in the context of culture might suggest to people familiar with health care or migration environments. Transcultural medicine has become a popular theme in the health care sector, because one has understood that health measures across cultures require culture-specific approaches, as the notions of life, death, health, diseases and their causes have culture-specific interpretations and the bodies and psyches of patients require differing approaches in line with the cultural background of the patients.

Recently there was a major congress on transcultural medicine in the German city of Mannheim, where hundreds of doctors attended. This points to the relevance of the issue in multicultural societies, societies with a great percentage of migrants; up to 50% among the youngest generation in some German urban environments to be specific. The changing demographic conditions require the institutional environments’ adaptation to cultural imperatives in this as well as other areas which in turn requires an enhanced mental and cultural horizon by professionals; an enhanced culture consciousness.

Culture therapy suggests a wider and more fundamental inquiry such as, for example, how one can take care of the cultural dimension of man in such a way that culturally based conflicts are prevented and cured. The Transcultural Profiler (page 5) is a diagnostic instrument which suggests not only the idea of cultural assessment, but also that a therapy. It is a dual use instrument for managerial and general diagnostic of individuals and societies, with global management organisational environments in between.

A therapy might be indicated, when the balance of a system has been jeopardized or is at risk of irreversible destabilization. Balance in the sense of the integrity of a living system ensures its self-regulating capacity and hardly needs therapeutic intervention. The cultural self-regulating capabilities of human society as a whole have been profoundly disturbed. Global strategists have envisaged military warfare to prevent irreversible culturally-based destabilization of the world. Culturally based conflict combined with the nuclear capabilities conjures apocalyptic scenarios.

The Greek root word of therapy is therapeia which means care or cure. The Transcultural Profiler or Diagnoser contains all possible cultural parameters and their relationships can indicate whether a system, as a rule the noetic-psychosomatic architecture, man’s wholeness culturally speaking, is in balance. The diagnoser profiler can also be used to reestablish the balance. Therefore it is a cultural diagnostic and therapeutic instrument for individuals, organisations and institutions.

The highest levels of the psychological architecture of the profiler can provide a cultural panacea, a universal cultural hygiene and ecology concerned with the management of the entire cultural psychological architecture due to the integrative function of the highest levels of mind and consciousness, while the lower levels of the architecture can help in providing limited intercultural solutions or therapies. The combination of approaches is a holistic approach to culture and its dialectical challenges: a holistic culture therapy. I would like to illustrate the hierarchical architecture of the transcultural profiler in the following representation. The higher noetic or transcultural level has a natural regulating effect on the multilevel architecture of the 12 X 12 dimensional hierarchical structure. When intercultural perspectives and measures do not yield the desired results the transcultural perspective can be helpful.

THE TRANSCULTURAL MANAGEMENT MODEL

THE TRANSCULTURAL PROFILER

A PROTOTYPE

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Culture is a structural and functional part of the individual. Man is said to be a biological and a cultural being. The two are interdependent. If he ails in one domain the other may be affected. That confirms the initially referred to importance of transcultural medicine.

If an individual is not allowed to live his constitutional cultural components which make up his cultural identity he is culturally alienated which causes psychological and physical ailments. He is forced to disassociate parts of his naturally evolved components which are part of his natural structures and functions or to replace them by others which he experiences difficulties to integrate structurally and functionally. Whether he experiences of deficit, the inability to live his natural structures and functions or whether he has to integrate incompatible structures and functions, both cause stress and disturb the natural equilibrium of the person.

Structures and functions refer to the psychosomatic being. Culture as collective mental programming or software of the mind affects the somatic being due to the psycho-somatic interdependence. Cultural disequilibria being part of the mental or psychological level of a person affect the somatic person, the equilibrium of a person as a whole.

When the disturbances remain in the domain of slight disturbances of comfort zones, the culturally accustomed optimum, resulting disequilibria can be integrated and adapted to. As a rule they remain peripheral and do not affect the deeper layers of the person. When the disturbances due to cultural pressures, however, penetrate the deeper layers of the person they may cause more serious disturbances of culturally evolved natural structures and functions. This natural cultural profile can be approximated by the levels D6 and D7, respectively the individual and societal culture profiles of the Transcultural Profiler

A cultural interfacing which penetrates the deeper physical levels affects in turn psychological structures and functions. The struggle to reestablish normal structures and functions creates additional stress. The psychosomatic interaction reinforces the stress of coping with the alienated state, the endeavour to return to a state of personal cultural integrity and normalcy.

The process could be intuitively modeled as a two-way culture-mind-brain-body-brain-mind circuit which describes how cultural inputs can affect the entire person, negatively or positively. As inappropriate food intake negatively impacts the body, so do inappropriate cultural inputs trigger a destabilizing cycle of the person as a whole due to the interdependence of mind and body. As long as the inputs are stimulants as maybe a fresh shower, they are reversible and can be considered mildly stimulating challenges which can be beneficial. On leaving the shower one recovers the state of normalcy with a heightened sense of comfort due to the preceding stimulating experience. If the input cannot be integrated at will by the individual a state of discomfort arises. In a way he is forced to remain under a cold shower, which loses its refreshing quality when it is prolonged and may even assume the form of a threat to a person’s psychosomatic health. This may occur through inputs at many cultural levels, societal, individual and also organisational, while the latter rarely penetrate to the depth as the former.

The difficulties to cope with the stress from inappropriate inputs to the cultural normalcy causes the pain of the cultural interfacing where the totality of the psychosomatic structure along with its normal functions are under a state of siege. Lotta e fuga, fight or flight is the natural response. One is relieved if one can leave the cultural and personal context which causes the stress of the siege. Then the alien and ailment causing inputs end. With it, depending on the length and intensity of exposure, the pendulum progressively swings back to normal. One consciously and unconsciously tries to search the accustomed cultural inputs which normalize the cycle and as a consequence reestablish structural and functional normalcy.

If one cannot avoid the alien inputs one has to develop strategies for coping with them such as affirming one’s identity, which may trigger a competition of cultural self-assertion by the diverse cultural interactants involved in a multicultural context. One may negotiate a culture of compromise, fight for one’s acceptance through information and communication and certainly strive to adapt in the longer term, if short-term adaptation appears to involve too much personal change. Cultural power struggles may exacerbate a situation and escalate into culture conflict if levels D4 Ethics and D5 Evolution are underdeveloped. If the communicators cannot find a common ground at the intercultural level with its uncertain claims the ability to access the transcultural level can be helpful. But such ability would probably have prevented the conflict.

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