ABSTRACT
The more perceptive nineteenth-century social worker saw her task as the repair of relationships broken by the social changes consequent on the first Industrial Revolution. The principle of 'give but demand' or of 'reciprocity' was central to the social work of C. S. Loch and others and marks a feature distinguishing their social work from their more 'psychiatric' successors. The idea of friendship has been used fitfully in social work ever since those early days. The application of the idea of friendship to contemporary social work appears more plausible. The identification of social work as a kind of therapy, usually a psychoanalytic one, arises from two distinct sources. There are those inside and outside the profession of social work who argue that 'psychiatric' influences have distorted what they see as genuine social work activity. A distinction is often made between the explanatory theories of psychoanalysis and the technical devices used to achieve particular results.
