ABSTRACT
IN MANY WAYS, the most crucial time for a troubled person is the point at which he asks for help. The request may be made of a friend, a relative, a social worker, a psychiatrist, a minister, or some other professional or nonprofessional source of help. It may be a request for advice: how to obtain vocational retraining; how to persuade a husband to return to the home or to protect the family against his return; how to convince sixteen-year-old Jimmy that he should give up his “bad companions” and return to school or how to make it clear to fifteen-year-old Essie that “she’s heading for trouble.” The request may be for tangible assistance in some form: a loan until payday, public assistance, treatment of a medical condition, child care. Or the request may be an announcement: “I just can’t go on!” or “I’m at the end of my rope!” or “My 291husband (or wife, or child, or mother-in-law) goes out of his way to provoke me!” Irrespective of its superficial or pervasive nature, however, the request for help made especially to a social agency or to a member of any of the “helping” professions inevitably is an admission, no matter how it is masked, of inability to manage one’s own life, or a particular aspect of it, at a particular point in time.
