ABSTRACT
People who want to make things happen in the real world are not typically that fascinated with their own thought processes, as such. They enter such fields as social work or clinical psychology with the thought of trying to do some good in their own lifetimes. This chapter begins with the aim of the game. The aim of theory in the helping professions is to improve our ability to control events. A principle in psychology that has shown a rewarding capacity for reducing the chaos of nature is: the organism will seek to re-establish internal equilibrium. Science is a social undertaking. A powerful factor in the development of ego psychology has undoubtedly been the desire to relate Freudian insights to those that have emerged in the social sciences in a parallel-but-independent fashion. But in social work, for instance, this process of "putting the social back into social work" must be viewed warily.
