Open AccessThe self in social work
Author(s) -
Adam Barnard
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
social work and social sciences review/social work and social sciences review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.16
H-Index - 9
eISSN - 1746-6105
pISSN - 0953-5225
DOI - 10.1921/swssr.v15i3.835
Subject(s) - self , individualism , identity (music) , social work , narrative , epistemology , sociology , social psychology , relation (database) , work (physics) , psychology , aesthetics , political science , philosophy , law , mechanical engineering , linguistics , database , computer science , engineering
Social work has a long and significant history in the use of the ‘self’. The first part of this paper is a contextualising discussion around recent reforms to social work. The second part is a historical examination of the conceptualisation of the self in the contemporary era. This discussion is intimately wedded to notions of identity, ‘social’ and conceptions of the self. This discussion will review the major philosophical understandings of self, before examining the ‘self’ in social work. Recently social workers have developed the term ‘use of self’ to indicate important aspects of the professional relationship and how this term is defined rests on how one conceptualises ‘self’.The final part of the paper will examine how social workers describe and involve the self that they bring to their therapeutic and non-therapeutic work. Participants in case-study, narrative accounts describe the self that they bring to their work as individualistic although at the same time stress the relational, positioned, relationship-based self. This examination carries the concept of the self from the notion of self as separate and constant to the self as a process in interaction.