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The helping professions in contemporary Chinese societies are becoming increasingly specialized and compartmentalized, such that the meaning of"professional" has come to refer to a person who has succeeded in learning more and more about less and less. In comparison with the traditional Chinese view of health and wellbeing, such an approach is seriously lacking in sensitivity and cultural depth. It is equally apparent that the humanities and social sciences are becoming increasingly isolated and superfluous due to their general lack of interest in facing the fundamental issues of human suffering. This paper describes the clinical humanities--a discipline which lies at the junction of medicine, psychotherapy, and the humanities--with a particular emphasis on how it can serve to increase the depth and breadth of our understanding of suffering and healing. We use "clinical" in the sense of"arriving at the site of suffering." As such, the clinical humanities is a way of applying the insights of both the humanities and social sciences--including such seemingly unrelated fields as the fine arts, philosophy, literature, history, anthropology, psychology, and religious studies--to the understanding and alleviation of suffering. In as much as the "site of suffering" is characterized by the flow and transformation of energy, the clinical humanities serves as a catalyst of healing energy. The main idea is to use the approaches of the humanities and social sciences to understand the abundant information which exists at the site of suffering to create a dynamic field of energy which has the capacity to bring about healing and transformation. In this paper we also present the development and scope of cultural counseling, a concrete and practical application of the clinical humanities. We also investigate how the humanities and psychology can be restored to their roots and become more relevant to the human predicament. Taking the life-world as the proper site of counseling, we explore the forms of healing which take place there. Moreover, we present an approach to cultural counseling designed to help expand the field of vision and application of the humanities and social sciences. Our purpose is to establish an indigenous clinical psychology on a foundation quite different from that of positivist science. In doing so, we make a preliminary sketch of indigenous psychology and cultural healing, at the same time unfolding the diverse possibilities entailed by the indigenization of psychological counseling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]