Radu Gheorghe
Assistant Editors
The psychologists are talking every day about diversity and universality in psychology. Is diversity a hindrance or an element which helps the development of psychology?
But what is, in fact, the ideal of psychology? Psychology is a science who proposes to discover the entire human diversity and to integrate this diversity into its own methods. But for this, there must be founded the causes of these differences between human beings. And these causes derive not only from the differences between the singular identity of each human being, from the professional or social identity, but also from the cultural identity.
The psychologist must therefore take into account the reactions of his clients, like people labeled by a culture that can or cannot have the same culture as his. These reactions send to history, sociology, ethics, myths, to the familiar or the personal history of the patients or even of the psychologist, and, sometimes, to stereotypes and implicit ideologies, which we have to know to desconspirate and because of that, first of all, we must accept to recognize them. Some of us have the inclination to deny these implicit differences, on behalf of one’s abstract universality. But psychology and every psychologist should adapt his own methods and the manner of approach to the ethical code applied to each client.
There are lots of psychology associations in the world, and most of them have their own ethical code. We may see quite some differences between these codes, since every large organization has its own philosophy, its own culture. So when you get to the question “Is this action ethical or not?”, people with different backgrounds will come up with different answers.
We suppose there are general guidelines that should be taken into account whatever the culture or field of psychology. We are talking here about values such as respect for the client, colleagues and for oneself. But when it comes to differences, you may not be able to say which one is “better”. That’s because the efficiency of one method or another depends a lot on the context. Practitioners from different cultures have different views on ethics, and bringing them together is very important. We are sure that all these views have their own advantages and disadvantages, but here comes EJOP’s role of facilitating communication. The actual ethical codes may be less important than being able to see different approaches on the same subject, depending on the culture.