Doing psychodynamic social work a basic introduction文档.doc

Doing Psychodynamic Social Work: A Basic Introduction Andrew Cooper (Adapted from Wilson K, Lymbery M, Ruch G and Cooper A, Introduction to Social Work, Pearson Education, forthcoming 2008) Introduction ‘Social work is a practical activity’. This was the pronouncement of a government minister responsible for social work in 2004. She was not wrong, but we strongly believe she was only capturing a part of the whole truth about actually ‘doing’ social work. In this paper we emphasise two other dimensions apart from ‘doing’ which are (or should be) ever-present in how a social worker conducts herself or himself. These are ‘thinking’ and ‘being’. The thinking component is partly about the importance of having a solid theoretical grasp of different social work methods, so that each step in your plan of activity is based on a clear understanding – a theoretically informed formulation - of the service user’s situation to which you are responding in a particular way that reflects this formulation. The thinking component is also about reflecting, learning to step back both during and after each phase of activity or ‘engagement’ and look at how the process and the relationship you are both involved in has changed, developed, deepened, or become problematic, tense, anxious…. These reflections are all in the service of evaluating how you and the service user are getting on with the ‘plans’ you should have made on the basis of your assessment (We say service user for the sake of simplicity, but of course there may be several service users involved, and quite possibly other colleagues as well). The being component may be less familiar to you in some ways, but it is no less important, and in fact once we have investigated it a little further it will probably seem obvious. Every time we meet, talk, engage, or develop even a superficial relationship with another person – or with a group - each of us has adopted a particular, emotionally invested way of ‘being’ in that relationsh