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Doing Psychodynamic Social Work: A Basic Introduction
Andrew Cooper
(Adapted from Wilson K, Lymbery M, Ruch G and Cooper A, Introduction to Social
Work, Pearson Education, forthcoming 2008)
Introduction
‘Social work is a practical activity’. This was the pronouncement of a government minister
responsible for social work in 2004. She was not wrong, but we strongly believe she was only
capturing a part of the whole truth about actually ‘doing’ social work. In this paper we emphasise two
other dimensions apart from ‘doing’ which are (or should be) ever-present in how a social worker
conducts herself or himself. These are ‘thinking’ and ‘being’.
The thinking component is partly about the importance of having a solid theoretical grasp of different
social work methods, so that each step in your plan of activity is based on a clear understanding – a
theoretically informed formulation - of the service user’s situation to which you are responding in a
particular way that reflects this formulation. The thinking component is also about reflecting, learning
to step back both during and after each phase of activity or ‘engagement’ and look at how the process
and the relationship you are both involved in has changed, developed, deepened, or become
problematic, tense, anxious…. These reflections are all in the service of evaluating how you and the
service user are getting on with the ‘plans’ you should have made on the basis of your assessment (We
say service user for the sake of simplicity, but of course there may be several service users involved,
and quite possibly other colleagues as well).
The being component may be less familiar to you in some ways, but it is no less important, and in fact
once we have investigated it a little further it will probably seem obvious. Every time we meet, talk,
engage, or develop even a superficial relationship with another person – or with a group - each of us
has adopted a particular, emotionally invested way of ‘being’ in that relationship. We might compete
with the other person or with the group members; we might be drawn to listen and empathise;
sometimes we want to ‘back off’ at once; some encounters seem to make us passive or withdrawn; or
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we become caught up in a feeling of elation and mischief…the possibilities are endless. But, setting
aside the fact that each of has a more or less stable ‘personality’ (a fairly consistent tendency towards a
range of ways of ‘being’) the important point is that there is no neutral, emotionally uninvolved way
to ‘be’ in a relationship. Something particular is always going on in terms of feelings, emotional responses,
patterns of interaction, the ease or difficulty of the encounter; and over time there is always some kind
of development, change, or evolution which is usually quite complex at the level of emotional
engagement with other people. The being component of social work interventions is about reflecting
on these processes, and coming to know about them through thinking about them.
So, even if a piece of work seems to be all ‘doing’ – for example, an emergency visit because a
severely disabled person living alone hasn’t been contactable for several days – these other levels of
the engagement will be present; with the development of your skills, they become essential to
carrying out the ‘doing’ in the most sensitive, thoughtful, attuned, and purposeful way. For example,
often we can be impelled in to action by other people’s anxiety, when a better course of ‘action’ is to
stop, think, reflect on the feelings that have already been mobilised in us, and only then decide what,
if anything, to do. Frequently – far more frequently than we often realise – what someone in a state
of anxiety finds truly helpful is not to rush into action, but to have their anxious state listened to,
understood, so that they can be helped to think more clearly, as our case example of work with a
young mother, Michaela, illustrates. There is a word for this way of responding to anxiety in
relationships – ‘containment’ which is explored in more depth in the section below on
psychodynamic ways of working.
Case study
Social work practice with a young Romanian mother
Michaela was a young single mother who came to England from Romania with her daughter to work.
But she quickly found that it was hard to earn enough to pay rent, live and support her daughter.
Christine was the duty social worker who saw her on her first visit to the office. Michaela poured out
her distress, and Christine was able to sit and listen and empathise; but she also helped Michaela to
understand some practical steps she could take to improve her financial situation, and she made a
couple of initial phone calls on her behalf.
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When Michaela came to the office again she asked Christine to accompany her to the Housing Benefit
Office. Christine thought about this for a moment, but said she didn’t feel that would be so helpful
and that maybe Michaela could tell her of her worries about going there herself. To her shock
Michaela turned on Christine in fury, saying ‘I thought you were going to be my friend’, and stormed
out of the office. Christine felt immediately overcome with distress herself, as well as guilty and had
to stop herself from rushing out of the office into the street to try to get Michaela to return.
Christine reflected on this episode, and began to see that maybe Michaela was even more vulnerable
than she had appeared at the first meeting. She was a very competent person who spoke good English,
but emotionally it seemed she had felt desperate, and developed an intense dependency on the idea of
Christine as someone who could (and should) help her in the way she imagined. Christine also
wondered if she felt guilty, possibly about the situation she had placed her daughter in as well as
herself?
Christine decided to visit Michaela at home. Michaela seemed immensely relieved to see Christine,
apologised for her outburst and explained that at that moment she had just felt quite panic-stricken
and unable to cope. She had already been to the housing office and it had gone OK. Christine
explored Michaela’s feelings and situation further, and it did emerge that she felt hugely worried and
guilty about her daughter’s future as well as her own.
This case study illustrates how doing, reflecting and being in social work are intertwined, and how the
value of not rushing into action can be empowering – Michaela’s panic is intense but fleeting, and she
recovers her own competence very quickly. Had Christine agreed to go to Housing benefit, or rushed
after Michaela, this might have been undermined rather than recovered. But this required a capacity
in Christine to think on her feet about intense and complex feelings that arose in the encounter, and
an ability not to get too ‘drawn in’ too quickly. Then she does ‘act’ by going to see Michaela, and this
re-establishes a proper partnership in the work.
These interconnected components must, as we shall illustrate, inform whichever of the methods you
select for working with a particular case or situation. However, in order to be able to think, do and
be, you need also to have a strong theoretical grasp of the approaches; we shall introduce you to the
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essentials, and at the end of the chapter give you suggestions for reading to take you knowledge and
understanding further.
Psychodynamic interventions
Introduction
In the history of social work there are probably more myths about psychodynamic practice, and more
strong opinions both for and against this method, than there are in relation to any other approach to
practice, perhaps in part at least because it was seen by ‘radical’ social workers in the middle decades
of the last century as ignoring societal inequalities and the impoverished circumstances of most service
users. To some extent this merely reflects how our society and culture divides strongly for or against
anything to do with psychoanalysis. The word ‘psychodynamic’ is an adjective meaning ‘based on or
deriving from psychoanalytic theory and practice’, and we use this adjective in preference to talking
about ‘psychoanalytic’ social work. In the earlier chapters about the history and development of social
work we saw how in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s there was almost a civil war in social work, with
radical political social workers often taking psychodynamic social work as their main enemy (as we
explored in chapter x, on history in the first section). But it has often been noted that key ideas based
in psychoanalysis are now part of everyone’s everyday thinking and language, as we illustrated in hg
and d chapter in discussing the popular use of the term ‘defence mechanism’. So, although
psychoanalytic practice and theory is still hotly contested, in some respects it remains the most
successful and influential psychological perspective of our times.
Because it has been influential and successful, there is a vast literature about psychoanalysis and its
various related practices such as psychoanalytic psychotherapy and psychodynamic counselling. There
is a more limited range of writing about psychodynamic social work, and we will refer to many of
these texts as well as giving you pointers should you wish to look a bit deeper into psychoanalysis.
However our main aim will be to offer an accessible account of this approach that tries not to
reproduce any of the myths and misconceptions that abound.
In this section we will cover the main concepts you need to understand in order to practice simply
and effectively using psychodynamic principles. We then discuss the stages, or the process, which a
typical psychodynamic piece of work entails and explore how to use yourself – your feelings,
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responses and observations of your own reactions - as a central tool in doing this kind of work. We
conclude the section by reviewing some of the important current research into the effectiveness of
psychodynamic work
Getting started – thinking about emotional experience
The best way to begin thinking about psychodynamic practice is with your own experiences – on
placement, at work, or in your own life. Psychodynamic theory proposes that people and
relationships are made up of at least two ‘layers’ of experience and functioning, a conscious one and
an unconscious one. The idea of the unconscious can seem mysterious and even frightening, but its
manifestations are in fact ordinary and everyday. Some years ago one of us was teaching a group of
qualifying social workers about psychodynamic work when a student said ‘You seem to be saying that
these processes that relate to the unconscious are just there whether we like it or not. So we can’t help
encountering them in our work…’. This seems exactly right, but in order to be convinced of the
truth of such a statement, it is probably necessary to open yourself to examining your own
experience.
Some social work training courses now require students to undertake a short, usually 10 or 12 week
observation of a baby or young child in an ordinary setting, either at home or in a day nursery. The
observer is not asked to ‘do’ anything, but just sit and ‘take in’ what seems to be happening for the
baby and then afterwards write up a detailed account of this. However, many observers find that this
task stirs up very strong feelings and important memories and realisations in themselves. Watching a
distressed baby who has been left alone by her caretaker for even three minutes – a perfectly normal
everyday occurrence - without doing anything to intervene or comfort the baby, can put anybody in
touch with very powerful feelings of their own. For example, feelings of (and vivid thoughts about)
our own emotional neediness, distress about times when we’ve been abandoned by a loved person
who we depended upon, anger with people we feel have mistreated us can suddenly come to the
surface. This is unconscious experience becoming conscious. But it is not necessary to do a baby
observation to access this kind of experience. An encounter with a service user who is stricken with
grief or guilt about the death of a loved one will almost certainly evoke powerful emotional reactions
in us – and these reactions will not just be ‘empathic’ or ‘altruistic’; we may find we become
intensely emotionally preoccupied once again with experiences of loss that we thought were ‘over and
done with’ when in fact they are still ‘alive’ in us, even if we aren’t aware of this most of the time.
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This then is the foundation of psychodynamic practice: openness to the emotional experience of
other people, which leads on to the need to be open to our own emotional experience, which in turn
leads on to the importance of us being able to hang on to the difference between our own experiences
and those of other people. Most of us have no trouble with this most of the time – we come away
from an encounter saying something like, ‘She was dreadfully upset, and cried for a hour, and
afterwards I burst into tears myself because I was thinking about my friend who died last year’. But
there are important processes that go on between people, discussed below, which make it harder to
know what is happening emotionally and whether it is ‘us’ or ‘them’ that feelings belong to.
Some psychodynamic processes and concepts
For now we will think back to the case study of Christine and Michaela in the opening sections of this
chapter. This involved intense and rapid emotional exchanges that Christine somehow managed to
handle to good effect. It is worth thinking, step by step, about what took place between them.
First, Michaela comes to the office and asks for help and it seems to Christine that Michaela is able to
listen to the practical advice she offers despite being very distressed. Christine has listened and ‘taken
in’ her distress, and for both of them this seemed a manageable if emotionally intense encounter.
Consciously, all is going well and seems on course.
But second, Michaela returns to the office and makes a request that Christine gently refuses. This
elicits an intense outburst of rage from Michaela that takes Christine completely by surprise.
Emotionally she is almost ‘knocked off her feet’. What has happened? In a way we can only
reconstruct later what may have happened, when we learn that Michaela in fact went to the housing
office straight afterwards and completed her tasks with them. Psychodynamic theory would suggest
that two things have taken place. In the first place Michaela has projected an intense and
unmanageable experience of frustration, despair, guilt and rage into Christine, who then becomes the
one who feels incompetent, anxious, guilty and panicky. But importantly, she stops herself rushing
after Michaela, and she succeeds in emotionally containing this experience. This gives her time to
think about and reflect upon her emotional experience.
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So, third, it seems that perhaps Michaela has rid herself of a whole bundle of feelings which at that
moment she found just unbearable. She was unable to ‘contain’ and think about them, and found a
solution that we have all used in our lives – probably quite often – she forced them onto someone
else. For the time being, this makes Michaela feel more able to cope. Later Michaela admits to
Christine that as she left the office she was full of hate and anger towards her for refusing to do what
she had asked. In some way she had gone in there feeling ‘bad’, but left feeling good (or at least
better) but having turned Christine ‘bad’ in her own mind - and in fact Christine does actually now
feel pretty ‘bad’ herself. In psychodynamic theory the process of projection is closely tied to another
one called splitting in which we project our bad thoughts and feelings into someone else, leaving us
good and them bad. In this way we often create a view of the world split rather rigidly between the
good and the bad. Thus, projection and splitting are examples of psychological defences against
mental pain. They are used to preserve a sense of the ‘goodness’ of the self – but as we can see they
also have a cost, for Christine certainly but perhaps also for Michaela.
Then, fourth as Christine begins to think about her emotional experience, she works on the idea that
maybe the feelings ‘put into her’ by Michaela may give her information about Michaela’s state of
mind. In particular she wonders whether the guilt she felt might be a clue to something Michaela is
struggling with, but has not been able to communicate about explicitly or consciously. This is
speculation on Christine’s part, a kind of hypothesis that she must find a way to test. But if it is right,
it is a very valuable clue she can follow up on. In psychodynamic language, this is Christine thinking
about her counter-transference. You may be familiar with the psychodynamic concept of
transference, a process in which one person ‘transfers’ feelings and images from their own inner
life onto someone else, who they then treat as if they were this ‘figure’ from their own internal
mental life. When you are the object of someone else’s transference, it is often difficult to spot at
first. The clue is often that you feel as though you have been systematically ‘misrecognised’ in some
way – perhaps excessively loved and admired, or hated and despised by the other person. Examining
what this experience is all about is the process of thinking about your counter-transference. It was a
big step in psychoanalysis when therapists began to realise that maybe transference was not just a
‘nuisance’, but in many ways the centre of the therapeutic process, the means by which the
unconscious could be known about in an immediate, live way if the recipient of the transference could
identify and make sense of what had ‘got into them’.
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So fifth, when Christine visits Michaela again she finds her in a quite different state of mind. She is
rather remorseful about how she treated Christine, and conveys that she knows she mistreated her
although she couldn’t help this at the time. She no longer sees Christine as bad it seems. In effect, she
been able to ‘take back’ some of her projections onto Christine, and see these feelings and
constructions about the other person as her own. Often in psychodynamic work, this part of the
process takes a long time because people’s defensive structures are much more entrenched than
Michaela’s seem to be. But working through such processes is a key aim of much psychodynamic
work, whether with individuals, couples, families or groups. Psychodynamic work recognises that
people need to be emotionally dependent on one another, but ideally also need to retain their
‘separateness’ from each other so they can be both individuals and fully participating members of
couples, families and other groupings.
This is what psychodynamic thinking posits as ‘good mental health’, and contrasts this with
relationships in which people are ‘mixed up with one another’ through the use of too much
projection. In the latter state individuals have ‘lost’ bits of themselves in other people and their
capacity to function autonomously is diminished as a result. In the case study we saw how this might
have happened at the point where Christine could have agreed to go to the housing office with
Michaela, thereby unnecessarily increasing her dependence on Christine. She would temporarily at
least have lost part of her competence by handing it over to Christine at a point of crisis. Of course,
with a different service user it might be the right decision to accompany them in this way – it all
depends on what kind of state of mind the person is in, and in crisis intervention work (which is
psychodynamic in its approach) more of this kind of ego support, that is direct support for the part
of the personality that usually is capable of functioning well, may well be appropriate. Referring back
to the discussion in that section, we might therefore assess Michaela to be someone is in a state of
great stress, but not in a state of crisis.
A final point to make about this case study concerns the social and political context in which the work
takes place. As we have seen, this is often a point of contention about psychodynamic work, and we
can only touch on the many complex debates and perspectives in this area. Michaela has come to this
country from Romania. The case study suggests that she may have been seeking ‘a better life’ for
herself and her daughter. She is what we sometimes call an ‘economic migrant’. Her circumstances
are therefore highly political in their nature and a consequence of social-structural forces acting on
her, although her immediate predicament is very personal. Our impulse is likely to be to ‘identify’
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strongly with the politically driven nature of a person’s circumstances. We have immediate sympathy
with the motives behind her seeking a life in Britain, and with the economic and social struggle that
her life entails. But of course she remains a person in her own right, who has taken decisions for
herself albeit in pressurised circumstances, and who feels an appropriate sense of responsibility and
worry about her daughter and the consequences for her of the decisions she has taken.
Psychodynamic work and values
So, psychodynamic work does involve some central value principles as well as an account of how
human beings develop and function psychologically. One such principle is respect for ‘psychological
truth’ – for example when Michaela turns out to feel guilty and anxious about her daughter this can
be taken as a sign of her being in touch with her sense of adult and parental responsibility, even
though the experience of guilt is painful for her to bear. To attempt to reassure her, or excuse her
from this pain, perhaps by reminding her of the difficult circumstances under which she decided to
leave her country, is really to miss the point and would undermine her own sense of being a human
agent who is capable of taking difficult decisions and working with the psychological consequences.
Indeed, one could argue that her current social circumstances make it all the more important that she
is respected and supported as a person in her own right who is experiencing pressure from external
forces, and stress from internal psychic sources. One of the most influential original textbooks about
psychodynamic casework used the idea that social workers are always working with a person-insituation (not just one or the other), and that people in difficulties are usually experiencing a
combination of ‘stress and press’. The socio-political and the psychological are brought together in
a useful way by these concepts (Hollis & Woods, 1981).
Thinking under fire: psychodynamic practice in ordinary social work contexts
Psychodynamic social work is not ‘psychotherapy’ although it will hopefully have ‘therapeutic
benefits’ for service users and draws heavily on the principles and theories informing psychotherapy.
So, how exactly does psychodynamic social work differ from counselling or psychotherapy? The brief
discussion above of the idea that psychodynamic casework entails working with the interaction
between the person and their situation gives a first clue. Counsellors and therapists usually see
individuals, couples or families for a programme of work that focuses almost exclusively on
psychological and relationship issues. They will tend not to get involved in practical matters, although
good therapy in public service settings will often involve working as part of a network (see below for
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an account of networking in social work) of other professionals who may be addressing these
dimensions of the overall situation, with careful agreements about roles and boundaries, or in other
words who is performing exactly what tasks. But psychodynamic casework will almost always involve
attention to both sides of the equation.
Some of the most influential policy documents in the history of British social work have stressed this.
For example, the Barclay Report (1982) conceived the key roles of social workers as a combination of
counselling and social care planning. Perhaps the central skill in being a good caseworker is the ability
to keep both these elements continually in mind as equally important parts of the task. In fact this is
one main part of what makes social work as a job so interesting and challenging on the one hand, but
also so difficult. The brief case study below, as well as the story of Christine and Michaela illustrates
the need to maintain this ‘binocular vision’.
Case Study – From Rescuer to Persecutor
Jamie and Tracey are both under five and were taken into care after they were discovered alone and
unkempt in the family home. Their parents Kerry and Howard are both long term drug users. John
became the family’s social worker after the Emergency Protection Order was taken out. He arranged
a package of ‘kinship care’ in which Kerry’s parents (Jamie and Tracey’s maternal grandparents) were
key, although Howard’s aunt was also able to offer important support taking the children to and from
nursery.
Everyone in the office, including John’s team leader, seemed to be relieved about these
arrangements, and it seemed that a potentially difficult case involving contested care proceedings in
court might be averted. At the case conference, there was a strong feeling of everyone being charmed
by the Kerry’s parents. But over the next three weeks, John became more and more uneasy about the
grandparents. Their actual care of the two small children did not seem that good, and he became
suspicious that they were in fact involved in supporting Kerry’s drug habit. When he voiced these
worried to his supervisor, he did not feel heard, and came away feeling that he had been subtly
rebuked for casting doubt on the care plan.
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It now felt as though he was the ‘bad guy’ in the situation, and that everyone had a huge investment in
maintaining the grandparents as the ‘good’ people who had ‘rescued’ the young ‘victims’ Jamie and
Tracey. At first John had felt like the hero of the case, for finding a solution that looked like good
practice and avoided painful and costly care proceedings, but now…
Clearly, John is responsible for the ‘social care planning’ dimension of his work with this family, but
what about any ‘counselling’ dimension? To suggest immediately that he might embark on a
programme of counselling with some or all of the many service users, carers and professionals
involved in this case in order to address the complex feelings that are emerging would probably be to
miss the point. At certain stages he might be able make very good use of individual counselling skills –
for example he might decide that some sessions with the grandparents to explore more fully his
worries about their relationship with Kerry and Howard would be helpful, or that some direct work
with the children would be beneficial - but for now the relevance of psychodynamic skills is to help
him understand the overall dynamics of the case.
These dynamics seem to involve processes of splitting and projection (see above) and importantly also
idealisation. Idealisation is often linked to splitting, because part of its function is to protect people
from facing difficult, destructive, or ‘bad’ feelings and behaviour. In this case it seems almost
everyone colludes to agree that ‘It’s not as dreadful as it seemed at first sight’, and to then to turn a
blind eye to the evidence that the idealised solution may not be a perfect as people wish to believe.
This process directly involves John. At first, when he proposes and implements the kinship care
solution, he notices a slightly unusual sensation of near elation in himself as his manager and
colleagues congratulate and praise him. Actually, he remembers thinking to himself that it wasn’t that
difficult to make this plan and in retrospect now he wonders if in fact it wasn’t just a bit too
easy…Later he has an even more uncomfortable sensation of being a ‘spoiler’ of the perfect solution
everyone believed he had found. This case involves a lot of strong emotions for him. What underlies
this turmoil and the rapidly shifting dynamics of the case? Perhaps the key will turn out to be the
anxiety generated in everyone by the case, and the powerful defences against anxiety that are the
surface or conscious manifestations of this underlying anxiety.
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Common but difficult social work tasks such as removing children from their parents’ care, helping a
dependent person decide whether they will give up living at home, communicating with an angry and
desperate young man who has run a way from home, or listening to someone falling apart with grief,
bring us into contact with states of great anxiety in service users, and mobilise great anxiety in us as
workers. Much of the value of, and the skill involved in psychodynamic work is about understanding
how anxiety infects so much of the work and potentially distorts our capacity to do good work, and
make good decisions. After all, we have almost lost sight of the important question in the case study –
what about the needs of the children? What is the best care solution for them? What does it mean for
their future that their grandparents may be in collusion with their mother over her drug taking?
Often, it is the powerful dynamics stemming from anxiety in those surrounding the vulnerable people
we are supposed to be working with (including our colleagues and ourselves), that prevents us really
working in their best interests.
The phases of psychodynamic work
Whether you are involved in doing psychodynamic work in everyday contexts, or in a more
traditional piece of counselling work, many of the same principles apply when we come to consider
the planning and the phases of the work over time. As we have seen, the central principles of this
approach involve understanding the service user, or the system with which you are working through
the use of your emotional capacities.
Engaging
The need for identification or empathy with the service users feelings, beliefs, experiences and
conflicts comes first, and is achieved through careful listening and careful attention to what your own
feeling responses tell you about this person and their situation. What kind of person does this service
user seem to want, or need me to be - an object of admiration, contempt, love, hate, or some
mixture of these? How do they engage me in the process of getting help for themselves – as a true
‘partner’, or with hesitation, anxiety, fear? Do I feel kept in the dark, or invited to share their
intimate secrets or something in between? These are the kinds of reflective questions that can lead you
to understand at the outset ‘who you are’ to the service user, or what kind of ‘transference object’
you are to them.
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However, at this stage the most important thing is just to allow the relationship to develop as the
client wishes. They need to trust you, and see that you are capable of really turning your mind to
understanding who they are and what is making them anxious, distressed, or conflicted. This is not
always as easy as it sounds – as we saw in the case study of Christine. Strong feelings can suddenly
erupt, and you are pitched into the middle of a powerful transference situation before you have had
time to draw breath. In the case study of John, and Jamie and Tracey’s family, the same is true in
effect – the dynamics of the situation unfold, and make themselves known to him, because he is able
to reflect on the information that his feelings and experiences give him. For Christine, the prospects of
future psychodynamic work with Michaela seem good. On the one hand Michaela is capable of
sudden, powerful changes of emotional state; but on the other she seems to be able to ‘own’ her part
in these exchanges, even if this happens in retrospect. Through the attuned use of self Christine has
begun to provide her with a helping relationship and has established a working or therapeutic
alliance.
Working through
As the relationship with the service user develops, the main aim of psychodynamic work comes into
focus – enabling some degree of change not just in their circumstances and practical affairs but in their
personal capacity to function autonomously and inter-dependently. Remember that psychoanalysis
does not define good adult mental health in terms of ‘independence’, but in terms of capacity for
good relationships which involve inter-dependence. This helps us understand the focus of a piece of
psychodynamic counselling – which aspects of the relationship with us, as workers, seem to be
difficult, problematic, not helpful to the service users’ way of functioning? And can we use the
experience we are both having of this here-and-now relationship to help them towards being a bit
more ‘in charge’ and to take ownership of these problematic aspects?
For example, after you have had several meetings with the user, it may feel to you as though they
have become something of an emotional burden to you. Nothing much seems to be happening now
and they seem passive, leaving you to do all the work. Or, reviewing things after several weeks you
find that they have missed half their appointments. Each time they do come, the service user seems to
have forgotten everything that happened in the preceding sessions so each meeting feels to you like
starting at the beginning. Now, using your awareness of these emotional dynamics – the counter13
transference, you are beginning to gain a deeper idea of the nature of the transference which the user
has established with you. It is important to remember that they are engaged, and are attending
sessions. So, something about what you are offering is important to them, but in other ways
something seems to be problematic.
Case study
Christine and Michaela – a difficulty
Everything went well for a time with Michaela. Christine was able to help her explore in some depth
her anxieties about her daughter, and her grief over her husband who it turned out had left her
suddenly not long before Michaela came to England. Michaela even arrived at the insight that perhaps
part of the reason she had left Romania was to flee the painfulness of the situation. She suspected that
her husband was having an affair with another woman in their town, and Michaela now realised that
she had not been able to face the humiliation and pain of discovering that this might be true.
But suddenly Michaela starts making excuses and missing appointments with Christine. Christine is
puzzled by this, and then she realises she feels hurt and rejected – she had felt the work was going so
well, and she has grown to like and admire Michaela very much. She talks about this with her
supervisor, who suggests to Christine that maybe Michaela has become scared of how much she likes
and admires Christine; but knowing that this is a professional relationship Michaela might be
protecting herself against the disappointment and anger that she knows she will feel when the
relationship ends – as it must – so she has decided to take matters into her own hands and ‘end it on
her terms’ not Christine’s.
Christine writes to Michaela and to her relief she attends her next session. Christine wonders with her
about the appointments she missed, saying that she had the feeling Michaela had got a lot out of these
meetings but that perhaps this made her feel vulnerable again, and angry with Christine for still not
‘being a friend’ and available outside session times. Michaela is sad but also reflective. She recalls now
that she always felt she was a ‘clingy’ child, anxious when she had to leave her mother and go to
school for example. She felt her mother had sometimes gone along with this anxiety, letting her stay
at home when she perhaps should have helped her overcome her fears. Michaela thought she’d ‘got
over’ this, but now she sees that separations, and ‘separateness’ are still an issue for her.
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In this phase of the work, Christine creates the possibility of something getting ‘worked through’
once more in Michaela’s psychological life. She uses her ability to reflect on the emotional dynamics
between them to engage directly with the developmental difficulty that Michaela still carries. From a
psychodynamic perspective everything now depends on how Christine handles the ending phase of
their work – will she get involved in a repetition of the dynamic that Michaela had with her
mother, or will she hold to her boundaries in the face of the transference pressure this dynamic
creates to avoid an appropriate ending? If she manages the latter, Michaela may actually have had an
opportunity for psychological growth, by discovering that she can survive her fears about separation
and loss in a new way. Hopefully, this may allow her to overcome her remaining unhelpful defences
against loss and achieve deeper possibilities for intimate and supportive relationships, as well as be
able not to repeat with he own young daughter the unhelpful aspect of her relationship with her own
mother.
Ending
There are many ways of ‘working through’ emotional difficulties, similar to the one described above.
But however successful or limited these have been in a piece of work, much of the progress can be
undone if the ending phase of any piece of social work is not handled well. In her paper ‘The end as a
means to growth – in the social work relationship’ Jean Nursten (1997 p. 75) says,
‘The inability to handle termination may sabotage all that has gone before. When it is handled well it
can become a growth experience for client and worker. This may be doubted by student social
workers because a practice placement does not allow time for a follow-up and the results of handling
and mishandling at this stage are not always seen during a student’s training.’
Perhaps you have understood enough of the dynamics of the working through between Christine and
Michaela to appreciate the importance of a well handled ending in sustaining Michaela’s ‘growth. But
Nursten also refers to the benefits to the social worker of handling the ending well. What might she
mean by this? Throughout this section we have stressed that psychodynamic social work is a process is
which the worker is themselves emotionally involved – the ‘self’ of the worker is the most important
resource she or he brings to the work. We have also emphasised how the social worker has to know
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the difference between herself and the service user, or in other words to be able to identify what
feelings and experiences belong to whom. This is no where more important than at the ending phase.
The professional social worker makes a clear and definite ending to a piece of work where at all
possible, not because she is cruel, wants not to be friends, or because she feels herself to be different
from or superior to the service user but significantly because not to do so perpetuates muddles about
loss and separation, and perpetuates unnecessary dependency on services. Dependency on services is
not of itself a bad thing – and some users just will need to be dependent on them for the long term.
But if they do not, then poorly handled endings may leave everyone confused about who needs whom
– does the social worker who does not end a piece of work cleanly ‘need the service user’ perhaps?
Christine acknowledged to herself how much she had come to like Michaela, and maybe she would
have liked to become friends with her. But her own ability to negotiate the loss of her client is the
precondition of Michaela being able to negotiate the loss of her social worker – and perhaps complete
the process of growth that the work has enabled. Because we are ordinary human beings, we all
struggle with processes of loss and separation, and so each piece of work can evoke our internal
conflicts about this. Managing it well may also help us grow a little more. Therapeutic social work is
done in the service of the user, but there can be benefits for the social worker too – just as we might
hope the whole project of doing good social work may be a part of the professional worker’s growth
process in their lifetime.
Does it work? Evidence based practice and psychodynamic social work
In our era of evidence based-practice, (discussed more fully in chapter x research)psychoanalytically
based interventions have come under intense scrutiny to see whether they can hold their own in
comparison to other forms of psychologically based treatment that make strong claims to be effective.
There are those who would argue that such a discussion is in fact something of a red-herring.
However, reviewing the whole range of approaches to psychoanalytic research and social work Briggs
( a social work practitioner/academic working from a psychodynamic perspective) (2005) concludes
that overall the contribution of research is to ‘enrich the reflective psycho-social space in which social
work takes place through bringing another perspective…’ Those who are committed to the
importance of scientific study of the outcomes of treatment would find this a weak position and point,
for example, to the NHS National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) guidelines on the most
effective treatments for specific psychological disorders. On the whole psychoanalytic approaches do
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not fare well in this context, but this is arguably because some varieties of psychotherapy such as
cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) have been better at playing the ‘evidence based’ political game
than have their ‘competitors’.
A dispassionate summary would perhaps conclude that the research evidence for the effectiveness of
psychoanalytic psychotherapy is in fact quite good, but that so is the evidence for a number of other
treatment ‘modalities’. Kennedy (2004) has conducted a systematic review of a wide range of
evidence for psychoanalytic child psychotherapy, and shows that there is strong, though not
conclusive support for the proposition that ‘it works’. One study that combined psychotherapy for
sexually abuse girls with support for their parents and carers delivered by clinically trained social
workers showed that the girls definitely improved, but in the absence of a proper ‘control group’
others have argues that this study does not prove anything conclusive one way or the other (Long et
al, 2004). Likewise, studies of the effectiveness of day hospital and therapeutic community
interventions for people with personality disorder show strong support for its effectiveness, and in
one case for a significant reduction in patients subsequent use of mental health services – thus making
a case on ‘health economic’ grounds as much as health grounds (Bateman 2004; Warren & Norton
2004).
In this section we have concentrated attention as much on the value of social workers having a
‘general psychodynamic awareness’ in relation to their total practice, as on psychodynamic work as a
form of ‘treatment’. Few if any systematic studies have been conducted of the impact of such an
approach on social work practice; equally no other methodological or ideological approach can really
claim better ‘scientific’ support. Perhaps this takes us back to the heart of a question about what kind
of activity social work really is - a science or an art, a question of intervening in ‘causal chains’ or of
‘making meaning and sense’ where little existed? Some of the case studies in this section could be
interpreted in both ways – just to make matters more complicated! One thing is for sure – debates
about the respective merits of the cultures of ‘evidence’ and ‘meaning’ will continue, and
psychodynamic approaches will continue to be part of these, not least because a significant body of
practitioners find them helpful, and a growing number of service users say they want ‘relationship and
talking’ at the heart of their services.
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