The making of the 'culturally competent' psychologist: A study of educational discourse and practice

This dissertation is addressed to the promise and problematic posed by ethnic diversity at the nexus of two American institutions: the education and healthcare systems. Specifically, it focuses on current efforts to prepare a group of heath care providers---professional psychologists---for work in the new millennium, when large portions of their patients will be drawn from minority populations. At the broadest of levels, its focus is on the following questions: (1) What is entailed in the "multicultural education" of today's psychologists? and (2) What does this education reveal about the conceptual underpinnings of today's multicultural psychology?;Based on narrative data collected during focused interviews with thirty-four psychologists-in-training and eight multicultural educators, I report the following findings: (1) Contemporary multicultural education is organized around a specific narrative---the "recovering racist" narrative---by which professional development among new psychologists is conceived as a highly personal and evocative process of resocialization; (2) What is known as "multiculturalism" in contemporary mental health discourse is best understood as a set of influential propositions that call attention to the psychological significance of oppression in the lives of minority help-seekers and, more generally, to the heretofore ignored relationship between sociopolitical and psychological phenomena; and (3) Multiculturalism's alternative to psychology's traditional (non-)conception of ethnic diversity is underwritten by a single binary distinction (majority/minority, white/people of color, privileged/oppressed---a distinction that is best rendered through the lens of contemporary "identity" politics.;Finally, in the dissertation's concluding chapter, I offer a preliminary critique of a multiculturalism so heavily indebted to the constructs, categories and imperatives of identity politics. A more "meaning-centered" notion of culture-psyche interaction is introduced, along with the proposal that multiculturalism, if it is to provide a truly comprehensive approach to mental health treatment across ethnic groups, ought become, ironically, "more cultural."...