The Good-Enough Social Worker: Understanding and Applying Winnicott's Concepts: The Facilitating Partnership: A Winnico'itian Approach for Social Workers and other Helping Professionals. Applegate, Jeffrey S. and Jennifer M. Bonovitz. New Jersey:  Jason Aronson, Inc., 1995,  290 pages.

Donald W. Winnicott was a keen observer and theoretician whose contributions to the psychoanalytic literature are central to the evolution of object-relations theory. Current research in developmental psychology, infant psychiatry, and developmental neurobiology validates the observations he noted starting over 50 years ago (A.N. Schore, 1994). In The Facilitating Partnership, Applegate and Bonovitz have given us a careful, thorough, and remarkably

comprehensible review of Winnicott's major constructs and their application to practice. While many of his concepts, like transitional object or good-enough mother, have almost become cliches, some of the more difficult ideas like ego relatedness and object use are not as easily grasped. The excellent explications in this work are profoundly useable for both beginning and experienced clinicians. They are illustrated by numerous clinical vignettes that give us the “experience-near” sense of the therapist/client interrelationship that is so essential in truly understanding and teaching the application of these seemingly straightforward, yet actually complex and subtle theoretical constructs. Although the clinical examples in the book are based on agency practice, they are equally applicable to work with individuals in any setting.

The stated goal of Applegate and Bonovitz is:

to concentrate on key Winnicottian concepts that are particularly well-suited to agency-based practice with people whose psychological well-being has been compromised by acute situational disruption or trauma, chronic psychological disturbance, or early environmental deprivation and related developmental vulnerabilities. (p. 12)

As they note, social workers have always been on the front lines. In recent years it seems that we are facing an increasingly distressed and needy population, while at the same time working under conditions that demand briefer treatments. Clients are vulnerable and unwilling or unable to trust, so that there is rarely an opportun