Social Work's Protracted Identity Crisis

Abstract

A review of social work's early history reveals a gradual struggle to develop a unifying professional identity. This process has been influenced by numerous factors, but best evidenced by the lasting impact of the Flexner paper, delivered at the Conference of Charities and Corrections in Baltimore in 1915. The paper challenged the professional status of social work, and is still referred to in current literature about the status and identity of the social work profession. This lasting uncertainty about social work's identity is reviewed from the perspective of Lacanian analytic theory. Jacques Lacan, a European analyst, was an influential and controversial figure in the field of psychoanalysis during the mid-twentieth century. Lacan's theory of the Mirror Stage and the Name of the Father are used to provide insight and consideration of social work's protracted identity crisis.