Social Work and the Popular Psychotherapies

Social Workers and Case Management

“…As one social worker told MacLachlan (1987: 27), "When you need ... resources you have to crawl, literally on your hands and knees, and beg them." It is little wonder, then, that for many years mainstream social work shunned case management in favour of "the popular psychotherapies" (Specht, 1990), where social workers can presumably assist their clients with little or no external resources.…”

Psychotherapy, distributive justice, and social work revisited

“…As Specht (1990) emphasizes, there are many people looking for meaning in their lives who have all the primary goods. Their problem is neither mental disorder nor deprivation but rather that life is intrinsically painful and puzzling as to its meaning.…”

“…Thus, both sides see my view as problematic. Those who, like Specht (1990), want to defend the traditional mission of the profession attack my view because they mistakenly see my defense of the use of psychotherapy in social work as a rejection of social work's traditional mission. Those who, like Dean, want to defend clinical social work attack my view because they mistakenly see my exclusion of mental health from the essential organizing value of social work as a rejection of the use of psychotherapeutic methods by social workers or as a rejection of the treatment of mental disorders by social workers.…”

“…This can be seen in Bar-On's (1994) definition of the mission of social work that excludes personal social services in favor of an exclusive focus on non-client resource controllers". A second example, also mentioned by Dean, is Specht's (1990;see Wakefield, 1992c) rejection of the legitimacy of using psychotherapeutic methods in social work, based on his definition of the profession which arbitrarily ignores the strong clinical social work tradition dating from Mary Richmond. These overly narrow, partisan accounts are not conceptual analyses but rather what philosophers call "stipulative definitions" (i.e., decisions to use a word in a new way) or "persuasive definitions" (i.e., attempts to get others to accept a new definition).…”

Reminiscences: Excerpts From The Diary of a Behaviorist: The Search for a Science of Psychology, the Early Years

“…Interest in advocacy and political activism is currently rising among social work students. Harry Specht, the late social work scholar and respected dean at Berkeley, argued that the mission of social work is to create healthy communities, and that this is how to make healthy people; psychotherapy for Specht is a distraction that is not core to the profession (Specht, 1990;Specht & Courtney, 1994). Community practice is again becoming very popular with students, and is an area with which many faculty are largely unfamiliar, sometimes uncomfortable, and in which they are most likely not to object to innovation.…”