Integrating the Internal and External Worlds of Clinical Social Work: A Philosophical and Political Search

Abstract

This chapter is a review of concepts from philosophy and psychoanalysis in their application to both clinical social work and our tradition of change agent. Having strayed from earlier values and traditions by stressing our clinical identification with other professions using psychoanalytic theory, we have lost our professional compass to the split. We need to reexamine our historical values and reintegrate them into more relevant responses to relieve the stresses of contemporary life. To recapture what we still prize of those lost values requires a conscious integration of our lives as citizens with our clinical work as they interact within the social environment that Winnicott called “transitional space” (Grolnick, Barkin, & Muensterberger, 1978). This is a complex process that many of us in the profession want to bridge.