All forms of psychotherapy are influenced by the culture that developed it and the time period in which the methods were developed. Factors that significantly effect the nature and the progression of the therapy are the ethnicity and cultural background of the patient, the social context, the environment in which the therapy is conducted and the attitude that the patient may have toward psychotherapy. .
Associated with the clinical experiences of working with patients in foreign societies, or working with minority groups, literature on intercultural psychotherapy began to appear in the 1960s. There was increased concern in the 1970s and 1980s with how to deliver mental health counseling for minorities, migrants, refugees, sojourners, and foreign students, closely related to the emerging human rights movement in the United States, as well as the growing migration of non-European minority groups into European countries, (Tseng, 1999). Although is easier to notice cultural issues when they are blatantly apparent between the patient and the therapist, all psychology is actually cross-cultural in the fact that one persons internalized construction of his cultural world is the same as anyone else's. In 1950, researchers Kluckholm and Murray introduced a tripartite framework that articulated 3 distinct and important points on the determinants of personality formation. They concluded that every man is in certain respects like all other men, like some other men and like no other man. Through this framework they established that some determinants of personality are common (biological), some are particular to a certain social group, and some features are unique and come from individual learning experiences that in turn influence values and beliefs (Leong & Lee, 2006). This framework is important in psychotherapy because it is essential to keep in mind that every individual seeking treatment is not the same so treatment should reflect to a certain extent the unique worldview of the patient.