Social Work

“The profession’s portrayal of welfare recipients as victims of psychologically abusive pasts stood in contract to a hostile popular and legislative discourse that cast ADC recipients as unscrupulous chiselers and immoral cheats” (Curran, 366). . . . In line with the profession’s psychiatric outlook, many postwar social work scholars claimed that psychopathology plagued ADC recipients. . . . Psychiatric disorders topped the list of psychosocial issues faced by ‘multiproblem’ families, the term postwar social workers coined to describe long-term ADC users’ (372). . . . social workers’ psychodynamic explanations for ADC use allowed professionals to portray ADC recipient as victims of their own inner worlds. . . . These psychological accounts simultaneously bolstered social work’s claim to expertise in the welfare arena. . . . Psychiatrically minded social workers further displayed their welfare-related expertise by sculpting a specific psychological model of poverty” (373, 374). However, whereas unwed middle-class mothers typically suffered from intrapsychic conflict (neurosis), ADC recipients suffered from character disorders(374-77). . . . The solution to increasing ADC rolls, social workers claimed, was professional casework, understood psychodynamically, i.e., the casework relationship as an “emotionally corrective experience”; casework as parent; etc.  advocacy of integration of professional casework services into ADC program, in which “a psychological viewpoint underscored the profession’s policy agenda” as they sought federal funding for casework services in ADC programs (378). 1956 & 1962 SS amendments provided federal matching grants for social services, including casework counseling, but the funds were never fully appropriated (379-380).