Tobie Nathan, a leading figure in ethnopsychiatry, profoundly transformed our understanding of these issues. In La Folie des autres (2012), he demonstrates that psychopathology cannot be separated from the cultural context in which it emerges. What appears as a symptom in one culture may be a legitimate form of communication in another. Intercultural therapy builds on this principle: listening to suffering on its own terms before attempting to translate it.
Why Seek Therapy?
If you experience:
- Living between two or more cultures;
- A conflict between family loyalties and social integration;
- Grief over your country of origin or guilt related to uprooting and displacement;
- Discrimination;
- Identity wounds or a gradual erosion of self-esteem;
- Transgenerational trauma;
- Symptoms that seem to have no apparent history or origin;
- Family secrets.
My Therapeutic Stance
Three guiding principles shape my approach:
- Epistemological humility — I do not assume that I know your culture. You teach me your frame of reference.
- Cultural curiosity — Difference is a clinical resource, not an obstacle.
- Co-construction of meaning — The meaning of your suffering is explored and constructed together, in your own terms.
My Approach
I do not impose a Western therapeutic model onto your reality. Instead, I draw on:
- Listening to cultural unspoken elements — what is left unsaid and how it is expressed;
- Deconstructing guilt associated with emancipation and becoming more independent;
- Working with transgenerational trauma when present;
- Recognizing the resources that emerge from your cultural plurality.
What Can Change
Beyond the symptom, intercultural therapy aims to support the development of an integrated sense of identity—one in which your origins and your present no longer oppose one another, but can coexist.