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Traditional clinical theory in social work has held that the treatment relationship is crucial to the therapeutic action. However, recently (Hanna, 1989, 1992b in press), I explored the pressures within the university that have led to a significant trend within social work education to devalue the role of relationship in the treatment process. Relationship data are often considered to be too soft to be central to the scientific base of social work practice. Instead, behavioral and cognitively based practice models are emphasized (perspectives that play down experiential factors in favor of specific technical interventions) because they lend themselves better to currently favored research methods for measuring outcome.
This is the second of two papers that reaffirm and elaborate on the centrality of the therapeutic relationship through a discussion of how differing psychoanalytic perspectives-especially object relations theories-can extend and deepen our understanding of the therapeutic action of clinical social work. It is my contention that the