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Via personal reflection on my life as trained psychotherapist and anthropologist, I will scrutinise anthropologically a growing trend within contemporary therapeutic provision, especially with respect to how culture should be understood, managed and responded to in the therapeutic setting. My aim is to articulate a series of propositions, informed by anthropological theory, but broadly inconsistent with today’s increasingly manualised psychotherapeutic trainings, whether such trainings operate in universities, through NHS/IAPT initiatives, or private training institutes. I shall argue that manualised psychotherapeutic training, which aims to attain consistency in results and conations across practitioners, has in this pursuit become increasing culture-blind. Not through failing to articulate a concern for culture, or as is usually put, ‘cultural difference’, but through having become wedded to a concept of culture as something possessed – as something one has, rather than as something one does.
