When Social Work and Psychoanalysis Meet

In this paper I share my personal journey from agency social worker to psychoanalyst. I show how I have brought to my psychoanalytic work the teachings of such well known social workers as Mary Richmond, Bertha Reynolds, Gordon Hamilton, and Florence Hollis as well those of such contemporary social workers as the late Gertrude and Rubin Blanck, Nancy Bridges, and Eda Goldstein, among others. In the presentation, I also consider how social work values, social work ethics and social work attitudes have influenced my approach to the practice of psychoanalysis. The attitudes which I refer to, include flexibility, beginning where the client is; an appreciation of the importance of understanding a patient’s cultural background and a recognition of the importance of the relationship in the therapeutic encounter. These were not standard for psychoanalysts at the time I began to practice. Today however psychoanalysis has largely caught up with social work, and this paper affirms how those of us who have had a social work background are well prepared for psychoanalysis in the 21st century.

The social worker as psychoanalyst

This paper examines the development of social workers as psychoanalysts to determine whether psychoanalysis is a legitimate function of social work. Historically, social work has found psychoanalytic theory helpful. However, it is generally understood that for the caseworker to competently practice psychoanalytic psychotherapy, advanced training is necessary. Although many social workers have availed themselves of this opportunity, the profession continues to believe that the practice of psychoanalysis is incompatible with social work. This is based upon an inaccurate conception of psychoanalysis. Since the social work psychoanalyst is concerned with the client's adaptation to the environment, his or her practice can easily be defined as clinical social work.     

Globalization,Psychoanalysis, and the Provision of Care: Roundtable on Global Woman

Global Woman describes the migration of Third World women to the West to find employment as “care workers.” The book prompts the author's ref lections on the current state of our own female-dominated profession of psychoanalysis. With the ascendance of the relational perspective, notions of care have gained salience as defining features of our practice as analysts. This development has prompted a countermovement to reassert a more traditional conception of psychoanalysis as defined by a particular set of technical precepts and procedures. The apparent opposition between these competing definitions can be deconstructed by examining how many of the technical aspects of psychoanalysis as currently practiced contain within them a (generally unrecognized) theory of care. Rather than engage in a defensive redefining of the caring nature of our work, we need to criticize our society's undervaluation of care.     

The Relationship Between Social Work and Psychoanalysis: The Future Impact of Social Workers

Because social workers are likely to have a more expanded role within organized psychoanalysis than previously, it seems timely to consider the numerous challenges and opportunities ahead with respect to social workers’ impact on the practice of psychoanalysis. For those who become social work psychoanalysts, in particular, a pivotal issue is the degree to which they retain their core identity as clinical social workers. It is important for them to integrate and balance the diverse aspects of their dual identity, to participate in our social work organizations, to contribute to developing psychoanalysis, and to work to keep the teaching of contemporary psychoanalytic theories alive in social work education.

Where The Trans Men and Enbies At?: Cissexism,Sexual Threat,and the Study of Sex Work

In this article, I examine the existing research on transgender sex workers and explore how cissexism and sexism overlap and shape this work. Overall, researchers assume that all trans sex workers are women, and all male sex workers are assumed to be cisgender. Transmasculine and other gender non‐conforming sex workers are absent from studies of sex work. Researchers in public health and criminology dominate the literature and this research is limited because it focuses only on trans women and because it focuses primarily on disease and trauma, and almost exclusively on HIV. The literature I examined treats transgender women as a public health “problem” to be solved, rather than addressing their experiences and needs as workers and as people in our society. I argue that in order to have useful applied and policy implications aimed at harm reduction, researchers must use a sociological lens to document what structural conditions push and pull people of various genders into sex markets in the first place. Finally, I advocate for the use of queer, intersectional, and transnational frameworks in future lines of inquiries as a way to push the sociological and public health literature on sex work forward in a way that will benefit all sex workers, their advocates, and service providers.     

The Untold Story of Clare and Donald Winnicott: How Social Work Influenced Modern Psychoanalysis

While the work of Donald Winnicott is well-known to clinical social workers, most are unaware of his rich professional collaboration with his second wife, Clare, a pioneering social worker analyzed by Melanie Klein who worked in child welfare, academia, government service, and psychoanalysis. This paper will review their work and lives together, outlining how their relationship expanded Donald's horizons in exploring the interface between psyche and environment.     

Breastfeeding and employment: A propensity score matching approach

ABSTRACT

It is well established within the scholarship on work and the family that many women experience difficulty juggling work and family responsibilities. Challenges to breastfeeding after giving birth are a specific manifestation of this work–family conflict. Many women report that they are unable to continue breastfeeding upon return to paid work. In this article, I analyze a subsample of 746 women from the United States Infant Feeding Practices Survey II to assess the effect of new mothers’ employment status and workplace characteristics on breastfeeding duration. This research reveals that new mothers who return to paid employment within three months of giving birth breastfeed an average of five fewer weeks than new mothers who do not return to paid work for three months or more. In addition, among mothers who return to paid work within three months, full-time workers breastfeed an average of more than 15 fewer weeks than part-time workers. These substantial differences in the duration of breastfeeding suggest that women face significant obstacles to combining paid work and mothering in the postpartum period.     

Gender as a Sort Assembly Tomboys' Stories

This article draws on a study of tomboys to reflect on developmental theory in psychoanalysis. To illuminate the power of chaos theory and nonlinear dynamic systems theory in understanding gender and sexuality, I trace three lines of theoretical work on gender, relevant to conceptualizing tomboy love and tomboy identity. First, I reexamine the work on gender development in which bodily life as the wellspring and organizer or gender is prominent. The second strand begins with the organization of gender development proposed by Stoller (1976) and taken tip and developed by Fast (1984). Its most articulated form is in the work of Benjamin (1988, 1993). This line of argument conceptualizes gender development through the pattern of relationships and the resultant identifications. The third strand concerns the understanding of “masculinity” in women and the evolution of work on bisexuality.     

Jurisdictional Competition and the Psychoanalytic Dominance of American Psychiatry

Despite constituting only a small fraction of all psychiatrists, psychoanalysts rose to a position of dominance within American psychiatry in the post-World War Two era. This article explains their success. A review of the social and institutional context of psychoanalysis and psychiatry reveals that many factors were actually unfavorable to psychoanalysis, and several others were at best equivocal in their support of analysis. Neither income, status, the relationship between institutions and ideology, or other such factors accounts for the success. After describing these factors and showing how they do not work as explanations, I argue that psychoanalysis succeeded largely because of its utility to the psychiatric profession in the growing jurisdictional disputes with non-medical competitors, specifically clinical psychology.     

MADE IN THE USA: LATINAS/OS?, GARMENT WORK AND ETHNIC CONFLICT IN LOS ANGELES' SWEAT SHOPS

In the 1990s Latino identity is increasingly constructed as a ‘universal’, ‘classless’ and genderless pan-ethnicity. In this article I problematize this construct through an ethnographic study of Latina workers in the Los Angeles garment industry whose jobs are not only gender and ethnic specific but also immigrant specific. These women are located at the bottom of a complex organizational structure of an industry that promotes Third World conditions in the US in addition to promoting inter-ethnic and intra-ethnic conflict among workers. The voiced testimonies of these Latina garment workers provide a vivid record of contractor abuse, the unrelenting demands and difficulties of garment work, and the exploitative conditions and ethnic rivalries that make it difficult for Latinas to forge an effective culture of resistance. I argue that the survival of Latina garment workers rests on their ability to negotiate collaborative relations based on their unique struggles and experiences within the garment industry as women, immigrants, racialized workers and specific types of Latina Americanas. Finally, I highlight the importance of recording the insights of those women who not only experience the contemporary conditions of global capitalism, but also endeavour to speak rather than silence these conditions.     

The Psychoanalytic Social Worker/The Social Work Psychoanalyst: What Shall Be Our Message?

Many social workers experience a powerful bond with their profession and with the contributions of psychoanalysis. This paper explores these bonds and demonstrates the substantial overlap, and occasional divergence, which exists between these two important fields. It is especially gratifying to see the renewed emphasis on the treatment relationship in contemporary psychoanalytic writings because the relationship has always been central to social work practice. Finally, all psychoanalytic social workers are encouraged to invest themselves in transferring the legacy of their work to beginning social workers, social work students, and the generations of social workers that will follow them.     

Boundaried Caring and Gendered Emotion Management in Hospice Work

Caring work, which is premised on caring for and caring about recipients, involves a great deal of emotion management. Feeling rules shape expectations about emotion management and are informally shared through workers’ narratives about quality work. Using qualitative data from hospice workers in the southwestern US, I find that narratives of quality within hospice include emotion‐management skills such as listening, truly caring, keeping calm and maintaining boundaries. Through an analysis of how workers discuss and map skills onto individual women and men co‐workers, this article highlights two gendered patterns. First, even when women and men are thought to share high‐quality skills, the ways these skills are described reinforce naturalistic understandings of gender. Second, men are seen to hold a broad range of emotion‐management skills, but women are not described as holding the most important emotion‐management skill: keeping boundaries. Understanding this differential application of emotion‐management skills helps us to understand how gender and gender inequality are reproduced within caring work.     

Pleasures and Perils in Looking Back Response to Fogel,Grand, Kahane,and Namir

I take up three themes that run through the commentaries on my book, The Pillar of Salt. First, I discuss the nature of remembering, particularly in the light of the lessons that have emerged from the recovered-memory debate. Second, I identify areas where feminism and psychoanalysis may inform one another, particularly at the level of clinical and political practices. A third theme centers on the contemporary revival of discourse on hysteria and problems that emerge in locating sources of misery in the histories of women.     

A Psychoanalytic Reading of Transsexual Embodiment

Theories of transsexuality developed by cultural theorists tend to ignore the psychic dimension of subjectivity. This article draws on Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, transsexual and transgender theory, and autobiographical narratives to reflect on what ought to be included in a psychoanalytically informed theory of transsexuality. Highlighting the work of Jay Prosser (1998), I discuss the importance of sexed embodiment, the problem of sociopolitical and biological reductionism, and the need to analyze, not to pathologize or to normalize, complex psychosexual processes. I suggest that the refusal to construct psychoanalysis and surgery as mutually exclusive constitutes the promise of recent clinical practice.     

A Feminist Trade Union Agenda? The Continued Significance of Class,Gender and Race

During the 1990s attempts to identify a feminist trade union agenda have focused on both the content and process of such a potential agenda. In a period in which trade unions have changed significantly, the general national agenda appears to be changing, acknowledging issues of importance to women. UNISON, Britain's largest trade union, has enshrined proportionality and fair representation in its constitution, developing national initiatives aimed at improving opportunities in work and in the union for women, black workers, manual workers, disabled workers, etc. who traditionally have been less well represented. Many issues affecting women generally have moved to centre stage, yet issues affecting women ancillary workers seem as excluded as ever. Through a study of cleaners in the National Health Service this article argues that workplace interests reflect wider social divisions, but in a variety of patterns depending on the social organization of work. Despite thewidening trade union agenda, particular interests — more specifically the workplace interests of working‐class women and black women — continue to be neglected.     

From psychoanalysis to clinical social work: An evolutionary process

The development of psychoanalytically oriented social work is traced from its beginnings in 1918. The author distinguishes between practitioners who do social work and those who do psychoanalytic therapy. Such therapy is defined as a method which attends to the dialectic interplay between conscious and unconscious forces. Social workers who receive analytic training may facilitate a much needed revival of psychoanalysis as the social enterprise which Freud originally envisioned.Keynote address at the Third National Clinical Conference of the Comittee on Psychoanalysis at New York on November 1, 1990.     

Sex Composition,Masculinity Stereotype Dissimilarity and the Quality of Men's Workplace Social Relations

Previous research suggests that the quality of men's work group social relations varies depending on the sex composition of the work unit. Previous studies also suggest that men derive different benefits from working with other men than with women and that the higher status associated with men and masculinity advantages men in their relations with women workers. Previous sex composition studies tell us little, however, about the extent to which the quality of men's work group social relations with women and other men depends on how well a man fits dominant masculinity stereotypes. Drawing on sex composition and gender constructionist approaches to gender and work I investigate in this study the effects of men's individual similarity to masculinity stereotypes on the affective quality of their social relations with coworkers, given the sex composition of their work groups. The data for this study consist of male, mostly white, non‐faculty employees of a public university in the northwest United States. I discuss my results in terms of both individual outcomes and implications for understanding sex and gender inequalities in work organizations.     

Cursed creatives: alienation,sublimation, and the plight of contemporary creative work

ABSTRACT

This paper connects the critical discourse on the ‘creative class’ with a longstanding lineage of thought on creativity in psychoanalysis, demonstrating their combined value in understanding worker subjectivity and exposing the perils of contemporary creative work. Drawing upon object relations theorizing in particular, the argument is made that the ‘objects’ of contemporary creative work coupled with its surrounding ‘potential space’ prove severely impoverished, giving rise to a newfound experience of alienation. Accounts of creative workers are presented to further elucidate alienation’s unconscious correlates, as well as to suggest ways of mitigating creativity’s compromised expression through the process of ‘sublimation’ – a concept central to the psychoanalytic theorizing on creativity, yet wholly absent from the contemporary discourse. Implications for the critical study of the ‘creative class’ are discussed.     

Contemporary Psychoanalysis and Social Work Theory

This paper maintains that much in the contemporary postmodern and relational paradigms in psychoanalysis is a refinding of elements of clinical social work theory. To illustrate that, this paper elucidates the pivotal differences between contemporary psychoanalytic theory and classical ego psychological psychoanalytic theory. I describe my own experiences in training, first as a social worker, then as an ego psychological psychotherapist, and finally as a psychoanalyst to illustrate how I began to realize the homologous nature of clinical social work and contemporary psychoanalysis. The beginnings of social casework theory from Mary Richmond and Charlotte Towle are then described. Like Moliere's bourgeois gentleman who discovered he's been speaking prose for forty years without knowing it, perhaps social work theory has been cutting edge for eighty years without knowing it.     

Gendered Projects of Solidarity: Workplace Organizing among Immigrant Women and Men

Drawing on an ethnography of organizing among Latina/o immigrant janitors in Los Angeles, I argue that constructing workplace solidarity between women and men is a dynamic, gendered project. I demonstrate both how this project unfolds and how it can be halted, with varying implications for gender and class inequality at work. Organizational restructuring upsets gender‐segregated divisions of labour making solidarity between women and men possible but restructuring also allows workers to reinforce gendered divisions and cultural distinctions. The mechanism pushing workers one way or the other is the degree to which the process of organizing recognizes gender inequalities.