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In social work, which focuses on how people function in their environments, the concept of the “person-in-situation” is central. Although this concept is of great merit, social work nevertheless lacks a theory that adequately connects the individual to his or her environment. The constraints of Western thought, with its tendency to separate the internal from the external, have prevented us from constructing such a theory.
In The Environment: Its Role in Psychosocial Functioning and Psychotherapy, Carolyn Saari takes a major step toward providing social work with a holistic understanding of the person-environment connection. In the past, lack of such an understanding was often blamed on the use of psychoanalytic theory in social work. Saari shows how contemporary psychoanalytic theory, with its emphasis on the interaction between organism and environment, has much to contribute. She maintains that, given the postmodern trend in psychoanalysis and the importance it attaches to context, it is impossible to conceive of any human affective response without considering the environment in which it occurs.
Following the introductory chapter of this book are three parts of three chapters each. In part one, Saari focuses on how the role of the environment is neglected in psychoanalytic and developmental theories. She describes affect, cognition, language and meaning, and culture and identity from a postmodern perspective and emphasizes the effects of environment in these domains. Mentioned in her description of this perspective are theories of attachment, intersubjectivitiy, social referencing, event