Introduction

Psychotherapy and counselling have been growing at an enormous rate in the last two decades. In the 1990s, we saw a signi®cant proliferation of counselling and psychotherapy articles, books and training courses all purporting to address the mental health concerns of culturally diverse clients and patients. Amongst these developments issues of race, culture and ethnicity are being addressed in various ways; sometimes through the popular but problematic concept of multicultural counselling and psychotherapy,1 and at other times through the exploration of race and culture in therapy. Within this pantheon of multicultural therapies are many nomenclatures, such as: cross-cultural counselling and psychotherapy (Marsella and Pedersen, 1981); `ethnopsychiatrie' (Devereux, 1983) and `ethnopsychotherapie' (Nathan, 1985); existentialism in therapy (Vontress, 1985); cross-cultural counselling (Pedersen, 1985); transcultural psychiatry (Cox, 1986); transcultural counselling (d'Ardenne and Mahtani, 1989); new crosscultural psychiatry (Littlewood, 1990); multicultural counselling (Pedersen, 1991); intercultural psychotherapy (Kareem and Littlewood, 1992); multicultural counselling (Ivey et al., 1993; Pope-Davis and Coleman, 1997; Palmer and Laungani, 1999; Palmer, 2002); and multicultural psychotherapy (Rameriz, 1999).