Kasandra

“psychotherapy in general and strongly opposed to its use as the major mode of social work practice, we begin with the assumption that both social work and psychotherapy serve important functions in modern life, although neither is fulfilling these functions very well. We believe that social work has abandoned its mission to help the poor and oppressed and to build communality. Instead, many social workers are devoting their energies and talents to careers in psychotherapy. A significant proportion of social work professionals—about 40 percent—are in private practice, serving middle-class clients.,”
― Harry Specht, Unfaithful Angels: How Social Work Has Abandoned its Mission

“Withorn asserted that the concept of professionalism itself was based on capitalist premises about work and social status. The “ideology of professionalization” (Wenocur & Reisch, 1983) led social workers to establish a form of monopoly control of the helping process and, inevitably, to hierarchical relationships between workers and clients and the rejection of collective forms of organization such as unions. Unionization of social workers had, in fact, slowed dramatically since the early 1970s. Radical social work unions had virtually disappeared since the early 1950s despite intermittent efforts of groups like RASSW and the Radical Social Work Collective in Philadelphia to organize them (Radical Social Work Collective, April 26,1978; RASSW, October 20,1979; Tambor, 1981, 1973). Calls by radical social workers to form or collaborate with unions continued to fall on deaf ears into the 1990s (Epstein, 1991).”
― Michael Reisch, The Road Not Taken: A History of Radical Social Work in the United States

“Social workers should not be secular priests in the church of individual repair; they should be the caretakers of the conscience of the community. They should not ask, “Does it feel good to you?” They should help communities create good.”
― Harry Specht, Unfaithful Angels: How Social Work Has Abandoned its Mission

“The major function of social work is concerned with helping people perform their normal life tasks by providing information and knowledge, social support, social skills, and social opportunities; it is also concerned with helping people deal with interference and abuse from other individuals and groups, with physical and mental disabilities, and with overburdening responsibilities they have for others. Most important, social work’s objective is to strengthen the community’s capacities to solve problems through development of groups and organizations, community education, and community systems of governance and control over systems of social care. The concern of psychotherapy is with helping people to deal with feelings, perceptions, and emotions that prevent them from performing their normal life tasks because of impairment or insufficient development of emotional and cognitive functions that are intimately related to the self. Social workers help people make use of and develop community and social resources to build connections with others and reduce alienation and isolation; psychotherapists help people to alter, reconstruct, and improve the self.”
― Harry Specht, Unfaithful Angels: How Social Work Has Abandoned its Mission