The ‘Arab spring’ within an intercultural couple. Does the unmentioned ‘racial difference’ matter?

Abstract

Can the meaning‐making within an intercultural couple, and between this couple and their therapist, help us to understand the couple's bitter conflict and the difficulties of dealing with it in therapy? This single case study answers this question, presenting a semantic analysis inspired by Ugazio's model of family semantic polarities. The analysis was carried out by applying the family semantic grid II to 140 min from three video‐recorded and transcribed sessions with the couple. The result suggests that the misunderstandings and disappointments that fed the couple's conflict were connected with the lack of semantic cohesion within the couple. They constructed meanings during the therapeutic conversation using two different semantic worlds: the semantics of power and of freedom. The analysis also suggests some possible strategies to overcome the couple's conflict, and raises some questions about how to address racial differences during therapy. An intercultural couple's bitter conflict is clarified by a semantic analysis (SA) which highlights the couple's low semantic cohesion. The SA suggests focusing on the emotions – shame and courage – underlying the partners' dominant semantics – power and freedom – and anchoring the meanings to all the family members. Therapists should address ‘race’ and racism with intercultural couples, even if such conversations do not emerge spontaneously in their narrated stories.

Cultural reflexivity and the referral problem: A discourse analysis of three initial sessions of intercultural couple therapy

“…As we have shown here, this can have a detrimental impact upon the therapeutic alliance, especially if a client's sense of cultural alienation is psychologised as the product of past experiences. Our conclusion sits somewhat in contradistinction to the semantic analysis of the same therapy sessions by Ugazio et al (2022), in which the most important contribution was seen to be the therapist's efforts to bring the conversation ‘back to the emotions’ (p. 72). We suggest that this might be true at the lived story/embodied level, but somehow hindered at the narrated level.…”

“…These proposed therapeutic manoeuvres can help the therapist shift from episodes of couple interaction to a wider conversation about social inequalities and power disparities, which has been characterised as a third‐order perspective (Knudson‐Martin et al, 2019). Our proposal is of a piece with Ugazio et al's semantic analysis (Ugazio et al, 2022) in which they advance the clinical technique of particularising the general and generalising the particular (Singh et al, 2020).…”

“…Our analysis borrows some data from this project. Indeed, the first few sessions of the same case study have already been subject to a semantic analysis (Ugazio et al, 2022), but we have different research aims. Our focus is on the intersections of gender, culture and psychopathology and how ‘strategies of power’ (Foucault, 1988) are used by the participants of therapy to define and establish the referral problem.…”

“…When she was sixteen years old, he was violent towards her, leaving her unconscious, which prompted their father to expel him from the family home. For further information on the history of the couple and the therapist's positioning, please consult Ugazio et al (2022).…”

“…Couples self‐referred to therapy as volunteer participants. Given that the couple in this case study responded to an advertisement for subsidised therapy for intercultural couples, it has been hypothesised that they viewed their problems primarily as intercultural in origin (Ugazio et al, 2022).…”