Role enactment: A social work method for inducing behavior change

Conclusion This paper has gathered empirical evidence in favor of a notion that our prepsychoanalytic predecessors knew intuitively: role enactment is a germinal social work means for producing behavioral change. In another paper the writer (Borenzweig, 1971) analyzes why the profession joined the exclusive psychoanalytic bandwagon and forsook its social psychological birthirght. The social workers of the social psychiatry era were concerned about issues contemporary social workers and psychiatrists are readdressing: how does the disturbed person perform pathological and socially requisite roles? How much more therapeutic leverage is obtained by encouraging the patient to enact roles in a milieu approximating the normal, in his normal milieu, or in both? The social psychiatry psychiatrists recognized their predominantly physico-psychic interest in the patient, depended on social workers for those aspects of diagnosis which entailed social functioning, and held the social worker responsible for the patient's post-discharge role performance. It is largely social work's influence upon psychiatry which concerns the latter profession with role. Recent psychiatric, diagnostic, and post-treatment evaluative instruments (Spitzer, 1963; Katz and Lyerly, 1963) incorporate the evaluation of role performance as asine qua non for psychic measurement.Social work has been the traditional ombudsman between society and its deviants. If Mead was correct when he said the psyche reflects the meaning the institutions of society have for a particular individual, then social work has always been grounded in the social psychological interstice between self and society. Role enactment, a social psychological construct, traditionally yet implicitly an almost unique social work technique for inducing behavior change, deserves to be explicitly canonized as one of social work's core behavior change techniques.