Some Implications of Object Relations Theory for Casework

Abstract

Casework, and to a lesser extent groupwork, has long acknowledged a debt to psychoanalysis. As Hamilton1 has remarked, those who lived through the era which saw casework incorporate the concepts of Freudian dynamic psychology “lived through a mind and life-shaking revolution”. We in a later generation are faced with the task of incorporating a rapidly expanding frontier of knowledge in the social sciences, which is proving to be perhaps just as challenging, albeit in another way....