Briefly explain the concepts of rugged individualism and ethnocentrism as White middle-class values, and describe how each has contributed to biased monocultural counseling practices according to your text.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Rugged individualism is the dominant ideology. It is perceived as healthy and normal in mainstream counseling practices. Individual rights are seen as most sacred, while collectivism is decried and ignored. Psychological research continues to promote individualism, thus contributing to attribution error. The I-thou relationship that is valued in traditional counseling is emphasized in many counseling theories. The focuses of such theoretical orientations stress individualism, autonomy, and ability to become self-actualized as healthy and normal developmental processes and desirable goals for counseling. Counseling practice, from assessment to goal setting and specific interventions, is about helping individuals solve self-identified problems without consideration for obligations or responsibilities to their social and cultural environments. Hence, rugged individualism is a culturally bound value that is the basis for most forms of counseling practices and biased monoculture counseling practices. Ethnocentrism is the belief that one’s worldview is the standard, superior and more desirable than others. Ethnocentrism is implicated in the perception that one’s cultural group should be the standard for judging what is normal, including behavior, language, customs and beliefs. In the United States, this means the culture of White middle-class. Ethnocentrism is a monocultural perspective that has dominated counseling practices from the beginning until today. It results from ethnocentric thinking that promotes individualistic rights and interests and pathologies non-White cultural behaviors. In practice, ethnocentrism can be harmful to clients from minority culture from assessment to choice of interventions as evidenced in the case of Xilin in the text. The preference for a counselor to practice from one’s in-group cultural point of reference for treating culturally diverse clients can result in pathologizing the client’s behaviors and result in unintentional harm.