ABSTRACT
Psychoanalytic social work serves here to develop a picture of the inner world of the client, one which helps to integrate the various aspects of his psyche and maintain the social worker’s own ability to think and reflect. A further area of psychoanalytic social work is that of antisocial developments which particularly affect adolescence. One of the classic fields of psychoanalytic social work is the care, treatment, and social integration of autistic and psychotic children and adolescents. Personality disorders are characterised by deeply rooted, inappropriate patterns of behaviour in a range of situations restricting a person’s ability to perform at work and in social life. They begin in childhood or youth and lead to impairments in various areas of functioning and in relationships to others. Non-residential measures in psychoanalytic social work are frequently to be found in the borderland between child psychotherapy and socio-pedagogic intervention.
