Starting from her clinical experience with migrant people, the author summarizes the theoretical and operational instruments in ethno-psychological field with a critical review of some key concepts: psyche and body, health and suffering, culture, ethnic group and race, diagnosis and treatment, individual and collective dimension. Especially, culture becomes most relevant when psychological competences are involved in cultural contexts which are different from our own: both when we work with foreign people in our country and when we are involved in mental health projects abroad. Transcultural clinic, ethnopsychiatry, critical medical anthropology and anthropology of contemporaneousness constitute the disciplinary horizon of therapeutic communications capable of managing caregiver’s and client’s cultural aspects.