Social Work

“ . . . the social workers of the twenties increasingly saw the need to professionalize in order to legitimate themselves with respect to clients and to gain the support of state legislatures, foundations, philanthropists, and other sources of prestige, funds, and institutional power. The key . . . was an identifiable body of knowledge that focused social worker’s practical activities in ways that would be nonthreatening to those patrons. [para] The solution was psychoanalytic theory. Social work professionalized in the form of the psychiatric social worker or, more generally, the caseworker armed with psychoanalytic theory” (Ehrenreich, 60).