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.