Social work and therapy: Reclaiming a generic therapeutic space in child and family work

Abstract

This paper underlines the need for contemporary social work to conceptualise a therapeutic stance for the profession. It argues that social work is most likely to reconnect with therapy in the generic space between the specialist approaches in child and family work. The therapeutic space historically inhabited by social work has straddled the personal and the social and a coherent therapeutic framework needs to encompass this dual perspective. The historical opposition between two of the main specialist therapies in the field--the psychoanalytic and the systemic--and the resulting entrenched divisions, has made it extremely difficult for social work to articulate an integrative stance. Contemporary recognition of some commonality between psychoanalytic and systemic therapy is therefore encouraging from a social work perspective. It offers an important vantage point from which social work might reappraise its own past integrative therapeutic tradition encapsulated in the psychosocial model of casework. The paper concludes with case material, which explores the psychosocial parameters of therapeutic engagement by the social worker and the generic therapeutic space in which such work unfolds.

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