Social Work Values by Noel Timms

Author:Noel Timms [Timms, Noel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9780429764899
Google: sOV3DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-11-09T04:48:57+00:00

The origin of the Functionalist School in the School of Social Work at the University of Pennyslvania, and, significantly, in its network of social agencies, owes most to the work of two women, Virginia Robinson and Jessie Taft, and mainly through the latter, the psychological ideas of Otto Rank, a Freudian schismatic whose theory emphasised the will to growth and the enduring effects of the birth trauma. The two most important early documents are Virginia Robinson’s A Changing Psychology in Social Casework (1930) and Taft’s article ‘The Relation of Function to Process in Social Casework’ (1937). Robinson’s book, though short, is currently neglected, but it constitutes one of the most crucial and, at the time of its publication, influential statements of a new position in social casework, which stressed both relationship and process. These ideas are now commonplace, even jejune, though they are not always well articulated or elaborated with imagination. Yet it was novel in the 1930s to argue that social casework had a unique contribution to make and that only in the field of the individual’s reaction patterns and in the possibility of therapeutic change in these patterns ‘through self-conscious relationships, can there be any possibility of a legitimate casework field’. To base the identity and the future of the only partially identified method of social work on a process of relationships and to endow that process with considerable authority was an innovation.

Such an innovation obviously advanced the interest of social casework as a profession in its own right and, as such, would appeal to any caseworker irrespective of orientation. What was distinctive about the Functionalist School was the claim that the skill of the social caseworker was not that of a psychiatric auxiliary, but a skill entirely sui generis based on a conception of a special process (of helping rather than of healing) and the active use of the principle of agency function which gave the process form and also linked both client and social caseworker to wider societal puposes, without making these dominant. Each of these ideas was developed in Taft’s article to which reference has been made:

There is one area and only one in which outer and inner, worker and client, agency and social need can come together effectively; only one area that offers to social workers the possibility of developments into a profession – and that is the area of helping process itself.

This process was one of helping and not one of psychotherapy or even of psycho-social treatment in any strong sense, and the main factor differentiating the helping process of social work from these other forms of intervention was the conscious recognition and use of what was termed ‘agency function’. This notion obviously gave the school its name, and it was formulated in Taft’s article in 1937. Taft, looking back some twenty years later, described ‘agency function’ in terms of a genuine discovery – and few of these have been described in social work. In a letter to another Functionalist, Ruth Gilpin, Taft

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