ABSTRACT
This chapter originated from a doctoral research project, which explored the impact of direct work on social work practitioners in the field of statutory child and family work. The choice of this research topic was determined by the author's desire, as a social worker with over 25 years experience in this field, to examine how social workers went about undertaking their primary task and to explore lived day-to-day social work practice. The chapter uses excerpts from interviews with social work practitioners, when they talked about their experiences of their work, and then proceeds to consider the meaning of this data, drawing on relevant theory. Direct work with families and children can have a powerful and long-lasting negative impact on practitioners, that affects their capacity to think and respond as well as invoking physiological changes akin to a stress response. Psychoanalytic theory and research in neuroscience as combined by Schore presents an explanation of the cognitive and physiological processes involved.
