ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the radical potential of Carl Jung’s concept of the ‘wounded healer’ for critical social work education and practice. The discussion is located within a number of contextual layers. These include the neoliberalisation of university and welfare sectors, increasing diversity among social work students, and critical challenges to social work pedagogy. Each of these contextual layers has, at its heart, an implicit understanding of how the world works, which the wounded healer concept can help to illuminate. The neoliberal agenda views the world as a bifurcated one, in which, for example, one is either a leaner or a lifter. Social work students bring to their education and future practice complex experiences of oppression and privilege that defy such a binary worldview, but often remain hidden and unexamined. Social work pedagogy, despite its stated critical intent, often reinforces binary ‘us and them’ thinking. This chapter explores how the wounded healer concept might contribute to the critical intent and practice of social work educators, who play a part in shaping future social work practitioners in a highly divided world.
