“Keeping Culture in Mind”: Relational Thinking and the Bedouin Community

Guided by Muriel Dimen’s conceptualization of keeping “culture in mind”, the current paper describes an effort to integrate relational psychoanalytic ideas with school psychology in a cultural minority group of Bedouin families in Israel. To this aim, we arranged a seminar on relational ideas for educational psychologists from different ethnicities. Four themes emerged along the course of the seminar, each representing a “meeting of the minds” between the concepts of relational theory and the Bedouin socio-cultural context: (1) reconsidering “subjectivity” and “intersubjectivity” in a traditional, patriarchal society, (2) the tension between shared mutuality and cultural norms of hierarchy and authority, (3) ethnic and political positions in transference-countertransference enactments, and (4) fantasies of sameness and difference. Our work calls for further discussions about the universality of relational theory and its capacity to positively address the needs of patients and therapists in diverse socio-cultural contexts.