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Social work-psychoanalysts have a dual professional identity. On the one hand, they are members of the professional community of social workers and must practice within the legal context of their discipline. Their identity as social workers is absolutely indispensable, a prerequisite for professional practice. On the other hand, they are also psychoanalysts. This implies a great deal more than the completion of specialized advanced training in a particular theory or in a circumscribed body of sophisticated therapeutic techniques. The psychoanalyst is not simply a specialist or subspecialist of a particular discipline. A psychoanalyst is also a member of a distinctive interdisciplinary community of psychoanalysts, a community with its own organizational interests, activities and purposes, its own opportunity structures, its own bureaucracy, and its own tightly regulated boundaries. This paper is the first of a series of planned publications in which I shall discuss the character of the social work-psychoanalyst's dual professional identity.
This conceptualization of the duality of the social work-psychoanalyst's professional identity is rooted in a sociological approach to the professions. Greenwood (1957, p. 45) provides a lucid overview of this perspective: “The sociological approach … views a profession as an organized group which is constantly interacting with the