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This volume provides mental health professionals of different disciplines an opportunity to visit the consulting rooms of practitioners who, treating the “ever widening scope patient,” have demonstrated that psychoanalytic methods can be applied in an effective manner for patients who might have been heretofore considered un-treatable. These patients were fortunate to be treated by dedicated professionals who could see beyond “social conditions,” and engage the patient in a treatment journey based on belief in the value and uniqueness of each individual life, and the belief that releasing potentials can be best achieved in the intimate partnership between patient and therapist.
Mary E. Richmond an early social work clinician, published Social Diagnosis in 1917, a text written to provide case workers a tool for assessment and diagnosis based on a social work understanding. Social workers, in the main, were actively engaged in working with children, delinquents, the courts, medical facilities, and families in crisis.
When a human being, whatever his economic status, develops some marked form of social difficulty and social need, what do we have to know about him and about his difficulty before we can arrive at a way of meeting his need. The problem may be one of childhood or old age, of sickness, of exploitation, of wasted opportunity, but, insofar as it concerns some one individual in his social relationships, it is not alien to social work as here understood. (p. 26)
When, therefore, the doctor or judge perceives social workers as an adjunct to his clinic or court, he may have but a dim idea of the distinctive contribution of authenticated and interpreted social fact which they should bring to his professional work. In this case, he tends to fit them into the traditions of his own calling and to ignore the characteristics of theirs. (p. 36)
Carolyn Saari, in her chapter, reminds us that the question is not