Intimate Relationships: Some Social Work Perspectives on Love

by Wendell Ricketts, Harvey L. Gochros, David A. Shore (Editor)

Experts present insightful perspectives on the social worker's role in the counseling of clients who have problems with love. As the social work profession recognizes that love and intimacy are essential ingredients of individual and collective social functioning, efforts are underway to legitimize the study of the complexities, problems, and characteristics of intimate human relationships. This book examines the dynamics of different kinds of lovelove of self, love toward others, and love between client and therapist. Other topics include romantic love scripts and their influence on people's relationships, sex-role conditioning, special concerns of adolescents, the elderly, and gay men and lesbians.

140 pages, Hardcover

First published October 16, 1987

About the author

Wendell Ricketts was born on an atoll in the middle of the Pacific Ocean,and raised in various small towns on O‘ahu, Hawai‘i. He holds a Master’s degree in Creative Writing from the University of New Mexico and has worked professionally as a translator from Italian since 1998. In addition to The Wrong Door: The Complete Plays of Natalia Ginzburg (U. Toronto Press, 2008), an early version of which received the PEN American Center Renato Poggioli Prize for translation, he is the translator of Communicating Success: Public Relations with an Italian Flair; Olive Oil and the Mediterranean; Trilobites: The Back To The Past Museum Guide; Ferrara and its Bread: The History of a Culinary Masterpiece across Seven Centuries, and Twenty Cigarettes in Nasiriyah: A Memoir, among other publications. He has also translated four books as yet unpublished in English, including the novels Generations of Love (Matteo B. Bianchi) and Around Three O’Clock (Andrej Longo); his translations of excerpts from two recent Italian working-class novels appeared in World Literature Today in November 2013. From 1986 to 1996 he was theater and dance critic for the Bay Area Reporter in San Francisco, California, and his writing about literature, travel, politics, the media, and contemporary social issues have appeared in such publications as Contact Quarterly, The Advocate, Dance Ink, Marriage and Family Review, Spin, Silent No More: Voices of Courage in American Schools, and 30 Days in Italy: True Stories of Escape to the Good Life. His fiction and poetry have been published in such journals and anthologies as Mississippi Review, Salt Hill, Blue Mesa Review, modern words, and The Long Story. He is the author of What We Lost in the Fire & Other Stories (FourCats Press, 2022), Cards from the Basket: 307 Imaginative Writing Prompts to Spark the Creativity of Writers, Writing Teachers, Students — and Everyone! and editor of Everything I Have Is Blue: Short Fiction by Working-Class Men about More-or-Less Gay Life (2005) and of Blue, Too: More Writing by (for or about) Working Class Queers (2014).