Dreadful Moments: Existential Thoughts on Doing Social Work

Summary Dreadful moments often happen in social work. This is when theordinary, reliable, taken-for-granted world is called into questionby a calamitous or hopeless situation. In order to respond thesocial worker has to relocate himself after momentarily plunginginto a vortex of trouble that destroyed the client's and, fora short time, his own sense of relatedness. Existentialism,which focusses on the whole structure of personal and interpersonalbeing and the necessity to act in the knowledge of freedom andresponsibility, does help with this relocation. Two cases, basedon actual social work, are reconstructed dramatically in orderto illustrate the positive use of the idea of dreadful moments.These are ideal-typical examples of successful social work whichcould be a model for a general phenomenological-existentialperspective in social work in which the author is at presentengaged.