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From its inception, social work has viewed the helping relationship as the conceptual linchpin for its approach to practice across a broad array of settings, methods, and modalities. Throughout the work of such pioneer practitioner-scholars as Gordon Hamilton, Helen Perlman, and Florence Hollis, we find an assumption that the worker-client relationship is the key mutative factor in effective social work intervention. Such abiding tenets as respect, acceptance, and a non-judgmental attitude speak to the centrality of the relationship and, by now, have become part of the lore of practice wisdom handed down from one generation of social workers to the next.
Through this intergenerational transmission, social workers “know” at an intuitive level what makes the helping relationship so important; yet the concept has been difficult to articulate in ways that capture its complexity and the skill it takes to employ it successfully. Since the 1920s, many social workers interested in direct practice have found in psychoanalytic theory a rich resource for developing a more extensively elaborated practice vocabulary. Early on, classical concepts like transference, countertransference, and resistance offered new tools for understanding relationship dynamics. A little later, with the elaboration of ego psychology, social workers found in such concepts as ego functions, defense, and adaptation more precise tools for exploring the interactions between clients' inner lives of impulse and conflict and the challenging realities of their external environments.
Yet neither classical drive theory nor ego psychology quite explained how the relationship does its work. Only with the shift in psychoanalysis from a one-person to a two-person psychology, ushered in by proponents of object relations theory and self psychology, have we found concepts and language with which to describe what we do with rigor, depth, and refined technical explication. These latter theories have been especially useful