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Social work was the first profession which made its specific province the utilization of knowledge for humane and humanitarian goals. Unlike other professions, such as medicine and law, it aspired to offer service with respect to the physical, psychological, and other needs of the unique individual-in-his-environment. Its aim was to alleviate distress and facilitate personal growth. Its preprofessional roots, which were the concerns and activities of philanthropists, arose in the latter half of the nineteenth century, roughly the same era in which the socialist movements had their beginnings. (To this day, both social work and psychoanalysis are looked upon with contempt by many radicals, who assert that social work perpetuates governments favorable to the ruling classes and that psychoanalysis leads patients to a bland acceptance of the shortcomings of the social system.)
Although social work predated psychoanalysis, it quickly made major use of psychoanalytic findings. However, as Strean correctly points out, psychoanalysis is not the appropriate treatment for most clients; psychotherapy is. While an appreciation of the unconscious is directly relevant to almost all social service, the uncovering of specific unconscious determinants for a particular client is usually irrelevant to the task at hand.
Congruent with standard social work texts, but far more tersely, Strean details the appropriate relationships between psychosocial diagnosis and treatment procedures. Using the work of Freud, Anna Freud, Hartmann, and Erikson, he then places heavy emphasis on the identification of the patient's psychosexual configuration and ego functioning as a basis for the caseworker's interventions. The caseworker can only be effective if he uses his knowledge of transference, countertransference, and resistance. Strean recognizes this, illustrates how this takes place, and comes to the valid conclusion that since the caseworker is in deed a psychotherapist, he is indeed a psychothera