Abstract
In 1986, the author of this chapter started to work as a psychotherapist at the Social Psychiatric Service for Refugees1 in Amsterdam, Netherlands. The staff of this service had years of experience with the use of psychotherapeutic techniques with refugees, but very little of it had been documented. Therefore, the author started to make reports of all therapeutic interviews he conducted, and to collect written material about the problems of refugees and other victims of trauma and the experiences in treating them. At the same time, the author consulted a selection of the available literature on psychology and psychiatry to find possibilities for making extrapolations that could help to enlarge the insight into the problems of refugees. The confrontation between the author’s six years of practical experience,2 the knowledge he found in the professional literature, and the knowledge and experience he encountered in numerous discussions with colleagues working in the same or a closely related field resulted in a body of practical know-how3 (Van der Veer, 1992, 1993).
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van der Veer, G. (1995). Psychotherapeutic Work with Refugees. In: Kleber, R.J., Figley, C.R., Gersons, B.P.R. (eds) Beyond Trauma. The Plenum Series on Stress and Coping. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-9421-2_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-9421-2_9
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