ABSTRACT
The social worker has nearly always been a reluctant writer. Social work is often concerned with aspects of human relationships and these have been subjects for writers, poets and philosophers through the ages. To describe human relationships and to attempt some generalizations about them is, therefore, to risk humiliating comparisons. Social workers have been slow to contribute to research. From time to time in the development of the profession reference has been made to the vast quantities of valuable data locked away in the records of social workers, but little or no attempt has been made by social workers to exploit their strategic position as observers of behaviour and as agents of change. The aspects of ‘treatment’ that have received emphasis in the literature are all concerned basically with the relationship between client and worker. Perhaps the most important change came when psychiatric social workers began to think of their work in terms of ‘transference’ in the psychoanalytic sense.
