The Israeli Play Therapy Institute

"As Shlomo Ariel guides the reader through observation, research, and psychotherapy with children engaging in symbolic play, the experience is refreshing and enlightening. He has examined children`s pretend or make-believe play with detailed attention to their language, their social interactions, and their cognitions. This is a challenging, thought-provoking book for readers interested in the science and clinical implications of early play. The analysis of children`s spontaneous language and nonverbal communication processes is especially insightful and opens up further research opportunities".

Jerome L. Singer Professor of Psychology and Child Studies, Yale University


"It is a privilege to write the foreword to a book which totally transformed this field of play study in such a novel and brilliant way"

Cited from the foreword to this book by Brian Sutton-Smith, Professor Emeritus, University of Pennsylvania

Book Description

The problems of a family are often conditioned by the cultural issues its members face, regardless of their socioeconomic background. However, most therapeutic models ignore this important factor. Ariel's book offers a model for diagnosis and therapy that incorporates cultural issues. It provides clinicians and trainees with readily applicable concepts, methods, and techniques for helping families and their members overcome difficulties related to intermarriage, immigration, acculturation, socioeconomic inequality, prejudice, and ecological or demographic change. This approach enables therapists to analyze and describe a family as a cultural system, explain its culture-related difficulties, and design and carry out culturally sensitive strategies for solving these difficulties.

[This is]An introduction to a general integrative model of culturally competent family therapy in which concepts, methods, and findings have been incorporated into a synthesis of various current theories. Drawing upon sources including social and cultural anthropology, sociology, and cross-cultural social psychology, psychiatry and linguistics, 13 chapters present an overview of culture and family therapy, family- cultural concepts relevant to diagnosis and treatment, the information-processing framework, culturally competent family diagnosis, and therapy.

2000 Book News, Inc., Portland


Culturally Competent Family Therapy is a path breaking book, intellectually demanding on the reader for its sheer sweep, while at the same time setting clear signposts for practicing family therapists. The author takes us through his framework step by step, explaining the meaning of theoretical constructs and the use of technical terms simply and clearly. The author's empathic and respectful understanding of the complexity of human emotions, fundamental beliefs and attempts at problem solving shines through all the way. Ariel brilliantly demonstrates the pitfalls of ethnocentric and culture-blind approaches on the one hand, and f cook-book approaches on the other.
This book is bound to become a key text for students and experienced practitioners alike.
I thoroughly recommend this book as a general integrative framework which
allows any therapist or counsellor to examine their own values and ways of
working with individuals, families, couples or groups.

Hilde Rapp, Chair of the British Initiative for Integrative Practice, Associate Editor, Journal of Psychotherapy Integration


A much needed volume that places the enterprise of family therapy squarely in the cultural context. Building on the author's earlier work in information processing models, Dr. Ariel provides the reader with an outstanding set of conceptual tools for enhancing family therapy practice in an increasingly ethnoculturally diverse world.

Ronald F.Levant, Dean, Nova Southeastern University; Former Editor, Journal of Family Psychology; Past President of the Family Psychology Division of the American Psychological Association


Sensitive, creative and intellectually rigorous - a remarkable combination. Shlomo Ariel's treatment of culturally sensitive therapy addresses some of the most important and most neglected sources of dysfunction and healing in families.

Israel W. Charny, Professor of Psychology and Family Therapy, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel; Past President of the Internation Family Therapy Association


"Ariel addresses this timely and important matter in an articulate and well researched fashion...."

Choice

"Shlomo Ariel...gives excellent indications of how to invite and facilitate families in doing what may seem at first to be too difficult, embarrassing or uncomfortable, and gives vivid illustrations of the sort of play that can be evoked and his way of making use of it….Shlomo Ariel`s book is to be commended to those who are looking for ways of involving children and adults in a different way. It requires a good deal of thought in terms of equipment, space and careful preparation of materials, but once this is done the rewards seem considerable"

Arnon Bentovim, Consultant Child Psychiatrist, Hospital for Sick Children, London


"The case illustrations are fascinating...This book will be of considerable interest to play therapists wanting to draw more on families` resources and to play therapists wishing to involve young children more directly in the therapeutic process"

Frances Guilford, Principal Clinical Psychologist, Bolton Health Authority, from a review in the British Journal of Clinical Psychology