Editorial

This first issue of 2019 comes to press at a momentous time for the UK, the British Isles and the European Union: Brexit day approaches. Brexit has companions in the rise of populism and the re-emergence of splitting in seemingly united societies in many parts of the world. There is tension between unifying forces that foster acceptance and respect on the one hand, and on the other hand, divisive forces that ‘other’, vilify and persecute. After the Leave campaign won, many of us in the Remain camp cheerfully and despairingly othered and vilified Leavers for a while, believing ourselves to be occupying the high moral ground. Realising we were not respecting or listening to other voices came later. If only it were simple. Whatever position our readers take, it is clear that the UK government has spent a great deal of time and money on the Brexit process, time and money that could have been spent on rolling back austerity had there been the political desire to do so. So here we are, faced with a political situation as complex and baffling as many a social work situation. So let us turn to our collection of international papers, which offer some welcome continuity as well as some innovative ideas about social work and social work education.

The first three papers focus in different ways on service user trauma, the impact on social workers and social work responses. The first is a UK paper by Stuart Stevenson who establishes a psychodynamic framework before describing his work as an independent assessor. Conceptually clear and emotionally aware, the article offers an unblinking exploration of his experience of working with a woman whose children have been removed from her care. He extends his understanding to analyse her position, his own, and that of the family and services which have marginalised her. In the second paper, Nicola O’Sullivan draws on some of the same literature to write about a small Reflective Discussion Group for social workers in Ireland. Once again the emotional depth charge of child protection work is communicated, for families and social workers, in situations which both experience as mutually threatening. In this paper, the effect of the group on the social worker’s ability to articulate her thoughts and feelings stands out, in contrast to her daily work life with its scarcity of supervision and space to think and feel. The third paper comes from a US context, where Edward Alessi and Sarilee Kahn take for granted that social workers are working therapeutically. Their argument is that psychodynamic approaches are as effective as shorter term methods such as CBT, and should be embraced by social workers and taught to them. Like the first two papers, a case example is used to illustrate the reflective thinking that psychodynamic work can produce. It is no surprise that these three articles together suggest that, in the UK and Ireland at least, the lack of time for reflective and supportive supervision takes its toll on social workers. Sandra Engstrom addresses some of these issues in the next paper on ‘organisational justice’. She establishes a strong conceptual framework for her small English qualitative study, and reports on the importance social workers attach to the quality of their relationships with peers and colleagues. She also points to the way that working environments where teams lack private space for discussions undermine social workers’ relationships.

The fifth paper on philosophy by Terje Halvorsen proposes that social workers should explicitly learn much more about the philosophical concepts that tacitly influence our ways of thinking about and doing social work. She provides a wide-ranging summary of philosophical ideas and positions, and this paper therefore bridges the psychodynamic papers focused on practice and organisations and the remaining three, which all concern social work students.

Tamara Blakemore, Kylie Agllias and Philip Pallas address the propensity of social work students to dispense advice and the prohibitions often found in social work texts against advice-giving. They report on a study undertaken in Australia, where the students examined their own advice-giving behaviour. This included a requirement that the students gave no advice whatever for a fixed period of time which, as the authors note, evokes Harold Garfinkel’s (1967) ‘breaching’ experiments, which are not without risk. Blakemore et al.’s design challenged and unsettled the students and seems to have stimulated insight and self-awareness. The seventh article is by Karmen Toros, who undertook a larger qualitative study with Estonian social work students. She links her findings to the ‘deficit culture’ she says prevails in Estonia, and hypothesises that if students are better able to identify their own strengths, they will be better able to work with service users’ strengths. The final student-focused paper by George Karpetis, also Australian, describes his use of psychodynamic theory in working with student groups on excerpts from process recordings. This paper implicitly points to the complexity of social work, where students have to manage the imperatives of policy, service users’ material circumstances and inner worlds, and their own personalised reactions and responses.

This issue also sees the publication of the 2017 Clare Winnicott practitioner essay award. Martin Smith is the author, a writer familiar to readers of this journal, and once again he has found a compelling and thought-provoking way of linking literature to social work. His point of departure is Stefan Zweig’s Beware of Pity, Zweig being a Jew exiled from Austria by the rise of Nazism.

Zweig’s novel starts on the eve of the First World War and was published on the eve of the Second (2011/1939). As this issue is published on the eve of Brexit, we have cause to celebrate the social work represented here. In social work we strive to keep our boundaries open: to new ideas, to awareness of our conflicted inner selves, to our colleagues and students, and to the people we work with who are so often ‘othered’ by others. These papers are testimony to our efforts to mend divisions, take in and respect other perspectives, and lead an examined life.