ABSTRACT
Our discussion cannot yet safely pull clear of history. For one can either see the problems arising from the results of effectiveness research in the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s as indicative of status-seeking disengagement from the poor, or as the denouement of a failed long engagement to Freudian psychology (back on the scene now after an unconvincing makeover in Paris). Writers seeking to explain why an unfolding crisis of confidence came upon social work as a result of the publication of experimental studies and reviews with negative outcomes have tended to plump for one or other of these accounts (see Mullen and Dumpson, 1972: Fischer, 1973, 1976; Sheldon, 1986). We suspect that both influences were at work.
