Not sure if i agree with the argument below but it is something to dicuss in my thesis:
The Counseling Psychologist, Vol. 23, No. 1, 4-24 (1995)

Internalized Culture, Culturocentrism, and Transcendence
David Y.F. Ho – University of Hong Kong

Internalized culture is introduced as a psychological, rather than anthropological, construct most useful to counselors. It addresses explicitly both between-group and within-group variations resulting from individual differences in enculturation and helps to sensitize counselors against stereotyping. The problem of defining cultural boundaries arises, with serious difficulties in defining three specific classes of cultural phenomena. It is argued that there is a basic continuity from intracultural to intercultural understanding. In a sense, all interpersonal encounters are cross-cultural in nature. Accordingly, all counseling requires an awareness of cultural processes and the transcendence of one’s internalized culture.

Well, it has been a hectic few weeks, i have been working on various things related to the PhD in one way or another (readings, writings, meetings, dialogue with peers, identifying next steps, supervision, literature searcher etc etc). The last week has been particularly busy as i am flying to Berlin tomorrow morning to present a paper at the XIXX International Congress of Psychology about Counselling in the context of the Greek culture.  so much work to do really and at the same time so many ideas are floating in my head about how i can use my research for my carred development post PhD. BUT….i really have to focus this year and say NO to other activities in order to reallhy focus on my main job which is THESIS WRITING.

I see that the months are passing quickly, the writing process in heuristic terms cannot be rushed really and i have to now give my best shot to produce a good enough, rigorous PhD Thesis. Whatever i have done during the PhD years will not show its value if i now do not manage to make a good synhesis in the Thesis i need to produce, this is what i will be assessed upon anyway…so, i am off leaving UK for a while and i will be recording my process as and when web access is possible…here i take off soon!

just a quick input in the blog. still working on research transcripts, data analysis, communication with interviewees and refreshing my reading on methodology so that i can start writing a draft chapter, parallel to preparing my presentation/paper for the conference in Berlin. Also, i have found somebody from the PhD group who has graduated now but has good understanding of issues related to heuristic research and its process to interview me in order to find a way to articulate more comprehensively my story for the auto-ethnographic/biographical chapter i will include in the Thesis and actually record the conversation so that i can then write the narrative in a reflexive way. I am glad that i found this way forward in relation to that, it is like a ‘midwifery’ kind of exercise, will write more about it when it actually happens. Back to work now!

It is Good Friday today (at least for the Catholic parts of the world…the Greek/Orthodox fellows will celebrate Jesus victory over death about a month later…) and it has been a quite emotional week, in terms of being encountered by ‘synchronistic’ incidents and conversations that reveal the underlying ‘political’ dimension of my PhD topic. As i am talking about cultures and mobility, i see that there is so much we carry from our histories, some of whihc still present, and they operate at an unconscious level at least very powerfully. And as my supervisor puts it in one of his writings: “I do know from my psychodynamics in families that some children do carry unresolved psychological material from their families and end up wrestling with problems that don’t really belong to them” (West, 2006 – The Friend’s Quarterly). This statement seems to expand to national and collective dimensions aslo, especially when certain countries have suffered a lot of violation and trauma that appears to be carried through from generation to generation, often in very subtle ways. And of course, where all this eventually ‘belongs to’ is a whole different story, as in my eyes at least, we are all connected. And even when a specific experience is not directly lived by an individual, when it comes to national collective experience with huge impact, the psychological echoes can be very strong … Read more »

I have recently had a lot of conversation and incidents around race, discrimination etc and am glad to receive the update of the Race and Equality Scheme conducted at my University here in Manchester (see report here), having as an aim to eliminate racial discrimination, promote understanding of religious and cultural beliefs and promote equality in these areas.