Fostering Healing and Growth: A Psychoanalytic Social Work Approach

Wherever contemporary therapists offer treatment, whether in social agencies or clinics, in outpatient or inpatient services, or even in private practice, they are likely to find themselves increasingly working with people whose histories are characterized by deprivation and repeated trauma–experiences that have left them feeling damaged, often short of basic trust in others, and lacking confidence in themselves. These people have tended to be seen as beyond the pale for psychoanalytically oriented treatment. The contributors to this volume would disabuse us of such a prejudiced opinion. They proceed to demonstrate the enormous value of psychodynamic perspectives with a varied clientele, many of whom in the past might have been deemed "untreatable." And they do this by sharing with readers the stories of their attempts to work with persons of diverse cultural, ethnic, and racial groups who come with complaints that point to severe psychopathologies. In each of the twenty-three stories, we are afforded a glimpse of the two actors in the drama as they meet and size up one another, negotiate and renegotiate their agreement to collaborate, work through and play through the shifting positive and negative transferences and countertransferences toward a working relationship, experience both frustrations and triumphs as they persevere in attempts to promote healing and growth. These are exciting narratives, documenting the ethic that underlies the psychoanalytic vision and the animation that it affords both participants.

About the Author

Joyce Edward, C.S.W., is a Board Certified Diplomate in Clinical Social Work. After many years in both private and public agencies, she now practices psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy privately. She is a Distinguished Practitioner in Social Work of the National Academies of Practice. A graduate of the Mandell School of Social Work at Western Reserve University, she has received Certificates in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis from the Institute for the Study of Psychotherapy. In addition to her clinical work, Ms. Edward has taught at the Adelphi School of Social Work, Hunter College School of Social Work, and Smith College School for Social Work. She has also been associated with the New York School for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy and the Society for Psychoanalytic Research and Study. She is on the Editorial Board of the Clinical Social Work Journal, to which she has contributed several articles. In addition she has co-authored two editions of Separation Individuation: Theory and Application. A co-founder and first co-chair of the National Coalition of Mental Health Professionals and Consumers, Ms. Edward has also served as the Chair of the National Study Group on Psychoanalysis and Social Work under whose auspices this book evolved. Jean Sanville, Ph.D., is a Board Certified Diplomate in Clinical Social Work, a Training Analyst at the Los Angeles Institute and Society for Psychoanalytic Studies, and a member of the International Psychoanalytic Association. A graduate of Smith College School for Social Work, she has served on its Continuing Education Faculty, and is currently teaching in both its Certificate and Doctoral programs. Her career, spanning a half century of practice, includes social work in family agencies, a mental hospital, psychiatric clinics, and private practice. Dr. Sanville was on the faculty of the UCLA School of Social Welfare for many years, and is currently on the psychiatry faculty at Harvard. She was a founder of the California Institute