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Call for Abstracts Journal of social work practice

The Journal of Social Work Practice is preparing a special issue on ‘Defences and Defensiveness’ for 2010. If you would like to suggest ideas, topics, authors or an abstract, please read on. A key concept in psychoanalytical and psychodynamic practice has always been that of psychological ‘defensiveness’ which takes the form of ‘resistance’ to particular insights and interpretations in relation to behaviour, thoughts, feelings and actions. In relation to social work, there is a ‘desire to know’, a ‘will to realism’, which supports the alliance between worker and client/service user, but also a strong ‘desire to not know’, a ‘will to maintain misrecognition of reality’ and an oscillation between the two states of mind is to be expected and handled in everyday life and in direct social work practice. As well as the ‘psychological defences’ of the client/service user, there are also those of practitioners — of ourselves as workers with clients/service users, our own ‘defended subjectivities’. Typically, this is often discussed under the notion of ‘counter-transference’. This move — away from a (defensive) view that all defensiveness is located in clients/service users, and not in ourselves — produces a much more realistic picture. However, it also gives rise to a much more complicated understanding of situations, particularly when we encounter defensiveness in other contexts, such as work with professionals — and others — from different backgrounds and philosophies of action. Finally, there is the application of the notion of ‘defensiveness’ in relation to the societies we inhabit and the set of institutions and organizations, where both we and clients/service users are located. In particular, the ‘defensiveness’ that organizations inhabit and generate is especially salient, because of the expectations placed upon practitioners and the practice we are required to follow when we are asked to work with clients/service users in accordance with agency policy and procedures — or ‘rules’. The notion of the ‘institution defending against anxiety’ is embodied in psychoanalytic and psychodynamic theory and practice (see the seminal work of Isobel Menzies-Lyth in her 1960 text on ‘the hospital’). It attempts to understand what is happening below the surface of organizations (sometimes called ‘systems psychodynamics’). The effects of struggles over regime change are crucial in this respect and desperately call out for description, analysis and shared understandings. For this reason, we wish to explore the complex and real relations between individual, personal, professional, organizational and societal defensiveness. How do we and how could we understand and reduce defensiveness practices by inventing less