ABSTRACT
The personal encounter with the other as a stranger, whose life circumstances and identities are very different from ours and who in some form or other is on a quest for recognition and in search of belonging, is the core business of social work. The types of relationships that ensue from these encounters are not kinship or friendship-type relationships, but formal-professional ones that carry a social mandate. This is why we as social workers need to ensure that they become social relationships. Constructing these ‘social’ bonds in modern societies where they are no longer ‘naturally’ given is a key task of all industrial societies where complex, formal relations prevail. The social professions play a central role in this project. But ‘the social’ today has become a most puzzling, a most contested and a most elusive concept. As a consequence, forming a sense of identity and of belonging has become an exercise fraught with uncertainties. The following reflections are therefore an attempt to search for the preconditions for a social existence and for the role of social work in grounding the modern self.
