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In reviewing Face-to-Face with Children: The Life and Work of Clare Winnicott by Joel Kanter, MSW, I must start with some personal reflections that, to my mind, speak to the place of this volume in Joel Kanter's ongoing effort to promote the use of a contemporary psychoanalytic approach in social work practice.
In the 1980s I was working in New York City as a social worker in an outreach and case management team which served young, mentally ill clients. In setting up the program, little attention was paid to the clinical orientation of the team, so we all struggled to find some type of model to guide us. At the time I was also in psychoanalytic training and used many of my case management clients as clinical examples for classroom discussion. Interestingly my vignettes proved to be quite relevant, popular and useful. As a result, I began to wonder if psychoanalytic thinking could be helpful in work with this difficult population.
Needless to say there was little in the community mental health and case management literature that took a psychodynamic perspective. At that time (and still true now) most of the writing on community-based work was quite concrete and almost phobic about psychodynamics. I had to look to the work of Harold Searles, H.S. Sullivan and Freda Fromm Riekman for guidance and, needless to say, I had to struggle to