It’s the beginning of August now, and the long summer break I’ve had from classes is coming to an end. We took a week’s break in Pacific Rim National Park Reserve, on the West Coast of Vancouver Island, the territory of the Nuu-Chah-Nulth first nations. We stayed in Ucluelet, which still preserves the feeling of a working town, with its fish processing plant and trollers at the docks. Tofino, the village at the other end of a forty kilometre stretch of beaches, is fringed by a number of resorts, and now feels more like a mass tourist destination. Here we were on the very Western edge of Canada, the place where Canadian road movies that start back East always end. The mornings were most beautiful. We’d drive to a trailhead, and then walk downwards on a footparth and then a boardwalk that led through groves of cedar and Douglas fir, listening as the sounds of the sea grew louder. If we got on the beach early it would still be deserted, and shrouded in fog. We’d look at the tables and come at low tide, so that we could kick off our sandals and walk for miles along the gentle curve of the water’s edge, the sand firm beneath our feet. We’d cross freshwater streams that cut across the beach, and tiny fish would dart out of the sand and swim ahead of us. Near to Ucluelet, we could hear the mournful sound of the foghorn on the lighthouse through the mist, and the ringing of a bell on a buoy that warned ships off the sharp black rocks. The landscape’s features were often named after ships that had been wrecked there: Florencia Bay, Tonquin Beach. As we journeyed West on Vancouver Island, we’d find other evidence of this story of colonization, settlement, and a struggle to overcome and tame nature. At Port Alberni, the town that’s a pit stop on the way across Vancouver Island to the Pacific Rim National Park, we visited the McLean Mill National Historic Site, exploring a family sawmill that was set up in the 1920s, closed in the 1960s, and is now preserved, frozen in time. Almost all of the forests we passed through on our way had seen the logging that the mill represented, and were second growth: as in the rest of BC, we’d see, hiking through those the forests, the giant stumps of felled trees. In Ucluelet, down by the water, there was a small bronze plaque to the first pioneer families; at Nanaimo, the port we arrived in after our ferry ride to Vancouver Island and departed from on our way home, the wooden Bastion, a fort built by the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1853, is still preserved, marooned incongruously on top of a multistory carpark.

            Yet this story doesn’t fit any more. Ucluelet was one of the few places in the province untouched by the wildfires that are burning throughout the interior, and its fog and location next to the Pacific meant that it escaped the heatwave. Yet even there, things were not quite right. We went on a wildlife tour by boat, but some of the wildlife that we would see thirty years ago was no longer there. The salmon runs have failed, and the fishing boats that used to cluster in the harbour are mostly gone. There were no orcas, that feed on the fish, and no humpback whales. We did see a sea otter, lying on its back in the kelp, part of a rare success story to reintroduce a species that was hunted to extinction on this coast for its pelts. And yet it seemed an almost futile gesture: a single animal where once they had been hundreds. The story of pioneering is also the story of extraction, of the suppression of fire and the planting of monocultures, that led to our present.

            There was, however, something that gave more hope: the growing presence of First Nations in a meaningful way. Hitacu, the largest settlement of the Yuułuʔiłʔatḥ Government, across the water from Ucluelet, looks prosperous. On the pathways we walked on, Indigenous ownership of the land is acknowledged. On the Tonquin Beach path, the explanatory signage had been written from the perspective of the Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation, and not only give alternative histories, but also elaborate a philosophy that foregrounds interconnection and care. So if I felt concern for a world that is burning, for a narrative of colonization and extraction that has reached its inevitable conclusion, there do seem to be here possibilities for new stories to replace older ones. Graves have been located, statues and names removed, with much less conservative backlash than you see in the UK or the USA. In this chaos, then, a small hope for the future.

            There’s also a parallel between national narratives and narratives of psychotherapy and mental health. I had Zoom fatigue ended up deciding not to take the course in Cross-cultural Counselling, not without some regrets, especially when I saw the reading list. I did manage to sit in on some of the presentations by guest lecturers, one on very specific work with the South Asian community in Surrey given by a very experienced counsellor, and the second by a researcher looking at traditional healing practices in Nepal. And I asked the course coordinator for the reading list, which I’m slowly working my way through. Unlike many of our courses at UBC in the master’s program, which have been taught by sessional lecturers, the class was taught by Rob Bedi, a major figure in cross-cultural counselling research. Here I’m going to briefly discuss two articles that were part of the reading for the class, one of which Bedi co-wrote with a graduate student, Mohit Bassi, and the other solely authored by him. The articles to me represent a welcome challenge to some of the scientism and lack of reflexivity I’ve seen in a lot of the classes I’ve taken, but they also illustrate for me ongoing weaknesses in critical work on psychotherapy, in that they are not in conversation with contemporary work in cultural studies, anthropology, and sociology. In discussing them here, I’m partly bookmarking them for the future, and thus this post’s a little more prolix and less tightly written than my usual. I’m particularly interested in thinking through what this research means for counselling in practice in Singapore, and in thinking about how selfhood in industrialized societies is increasingly a selfhood constructed through psychotherapy.

            In the two articles Bedi writes as a part of a movement that we might see as parallel to projects undertaken by historians two decades ago, marked by texts such as Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe, which attempted to question historical accounts that saw Europe as the historical origin of modernity. We might say that Bedi attempts to provincialize psychotherapy, to replace a pioneering narrative of continuing development with something much more nuanced. Bedi and Bassi thus reject the ““the medical diagnose-and-treatment paradigm” (192) that is central to much psychiatric training, and much of a history of quantitative research that attempts to remove contextual variables in a search for universal applicability. In doing so, they embrace the contextual model of understanding psychotherapy associated with Bruce Wampold, in which psychotherapy is seen not as a science but a healing art, marked by a close relationship with the therapist, a series of rituals, and a shared narrative of recovery. They furthermore note that this art is culturally embedded, and thus not “universally valid” (192); psychotherapy as a healing art is both unique to the West, and yet also shares “important therapeutic systems and structures with all well-established indigenous healing approaches across the world” (192). If we recognize that psychotherapy and associated counselling, are in effect, indigenous healing methods of “the Euro-American West” (187), then we should be careful in applying them globally. Indigenous and traditional healers should be treated with, respect, and collaborated with as equals, rather than dismissed. Furthermore, counsellors trained in Western method might work with traditional healers in order to have them further develop and provide “culturally congruent psychological interventions” (190)

There’s much to like in this argument, and Bedi and Bassi’s critique of the World Health Organization’s Mental Health Gap Action Programme is particularly well taken. I’m very much in favour of the contextual model, and one of the things that I’ve noticed in my training already is how, despite a commitment to diversity, how reluctant counsellors are to talk about how many of the different psychotherapeutic modalities are clearly culturally marked in a fundamental way. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, for instance, stresses ultimately rational self-regulation through cognition; person-centred therapy has, at its core, a notion of individual self-realization. As you’ll know from a recent post, I’m also curious about the cultural specificity of attachment theory which underlies Emotionally Focused Therapy. And the point about respecting and working with people in a community who do different kinds of healing work is an important one, and one my training has not paid enough attention to.

And yet, as I’ve written before, it does seem as though work such as Bedi’s, like much contemporary work in counselling psychology, doesn’t talk to a whole history of discussion of culture in anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies. Culture, anthropologists say, isn’t what you are, but what you do. Thus Bedi and Bassi’s analysis is marked by a series of binarisms, between the “Euro-American West” and tradition/indigeneity, and between individualising and collective societies, in which appears that modernity can only be reached through Westernization. There’s a lack of historical awareness, so that the welcoming of the WHO Mental Health Action Gap Programme in countries such as India is taken simply as evidence of a “colonial mentality,” without considering the rationalizing role of the developmental state. Culture is also abstracted from economic forces: there is no discussion about how subjectivities normalized through psychotherapy are the globalising subjectivities on which capitalism is founded. In Singapore, and in much of urbanized Asia marked by migration, the traditional or indigenous is not so easy to locate, and a the “long-standing traditional healing practices which are deeply woven within the fabric of a national culture’s mentality” (Bedi and Basu 190) are fluid, complex and contested: the “traditional” is difficult to identity, and to resist its authority is not simply “colonial.” Think, for instance, of the potential complex reactions of different members of a Malay Muslim family to the presence of a bomoh, whose practices may conflict with Islam, with medical discourses, and also with progressive epistemologies such as feminism. Or of the differing responses of a Chinese family, only some members of whom are Christian, to the laying on of hands as a healing practice in Pentecostal Churches in Singapore. And finally, what of counselling practices that have been developed within a specific modern social context, such as Morita Therapy in Japan and, increasingly in East Asia?

I’m not sure of the answers to these questions, and I suspect that we wouldn’t have had chances to really think them through in the very short three weeks of the course if I’d taken it. Yet they remain important questions: I’ve finished my formal academic training, and yet for me a fundamental gap between theory and practice remains unbridged. As I begin my practicum, epistemological issues will no doubt recede: I’ll be concerned with how to care for the person I am in conversation in the moment, adopting theories of change that “work” in the present, and yet which I would like to think much about, even as we follow them together.