Introduction

This book grew out of discussions with students training to be clinicians at Smith College School for Social Work. They valued their psychodynamic clinical training but recognized that it omitted the element of social action that had attracted many of them to the profession. They were disturbed that advocacy and social action, asserted in the profession's values and ethics, were generally absent and sometimes discouraged in the training they received, and that their training was dichotomized. This historical dichotomy between clinical work and social action, between the approaches of Mary Richmond and Jane Addams, continues today in social work schools and social agencies, despite lip service to the contrary.