The Facilitating Partnership: A Winnicottian Approach for Social Workers and Other Helping Professionals

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A young mother suspected of abusing her toddler, a severely behavior-disordered teenager who faces expulsion from his community residence, a depressed and illiterate homeless man who fears psychiatric evaluation. These clients populate the caseloads of most mental health professionals, who often view them as too crisis-ridden, deprived, and overwhelmed with concrete needs to benefit from an in-depth approach to their problems. However, without this kind of treatment, such people continually reappear at social service agencies, their core psychological issues left unaddressed and their life situations unraveling. What can psychoanalytic theory offer practitioners working with these challenging clients Although the helping professions have enjoyed a long and fruitful association with psychoanalysis, often the application of this theory has focused on treating motivated, articulate, financially secure clients in private practice. In The Facilitating Partnership, Jeffrey Applegate and Jennifer Bonovitz show how D. W. Winnicott's therapeutic ideas and technique are particularly relevant to a agency-based psychodynamic treatment of clients whose histories of deprivation and trauma historically have made them unlikelyand reluctantcandidates for in-depth clinical services. Winnicott's concepts are especially powerful in capturing the 'silent,' supportive, sustaining, relationship-based dimensions of clinical work and the authors provide an accessible language for explicating these invaluable activities. Through extensive case vignettes, Applegate and Bonovitz demonstrate that interventions emerging from Winnicott's key conceptsthe good enough mother, the holding environmentcan bolster clients' ego strengths and coping capacities while promoting their psychosocial development in ways that help them profoundly alter maladaptive life patterns. A Jason Aronson Book

Reviews

This book will be of great interest not only to social workers but to all clinicians who are trying to make use of psychoanalytic ideas in settings other than that of private practice. Applegate and Bonovitz award Winnicott a central place in unfolding post-classical theories and methods, where the experience of the therapeutic relationship is itself deemed a powerful mutative factor. Not only do the authors explicate clearly Winnicott's sometimes puzzling metaphorical and poetic language, but they provide us with what is so often lacking in such textsa rich array of clinical cases from agency-based social work practice, demonstrating anew the ever-widening scope of psychoanalytic thought... -- Jean B. Sanville
Social workers and helpers from similar professions have increasingly been recognizing that D. W. Winnicott's ideas are extremely useful to practice, but these ideas have been scattered throughout numerous papers and books. In pulling together and explaining the entirety of Winnicott's work, Applegate and Bonovitz have done us all a major service. The work is very readable and the application through extensive case material makes it ideal for both experienced practitioners and as a text for beginning students. It is particularly welcome as a reminder that the overly technique-oriented pressures from managed care result in a loss of an essential understanding of the client's inner life... -- Carolyn Saari
Drs. Applegate and Bonovitz have written a book about real patients: sullen, regressed, messy, frightened, and often resourceless. Their therapeutic approach is unabashedly pragmatic, at times innovative, and always unmistakably humane. While largely based upon Winnicott's ideas, their work is more than an exposition. They skillfully synthesize his views with those of Klein, Mahler, Kohut, Anzieu, Bollas, and Stern. More important, they succeed in achieving the risky but precious balance between individual psychotherapy and environmental intervention that is needed by many despondent and helpless individuals. Truly a superb work!!! -- Salman Akhtar, MD, professor of psychiatry, Jefferson Medical College; training and supervising analyst, Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia

Author Bio

Jeffrey S. Applegate, D.S.W., is a member of the faculty of the Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research, Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, where he maintains a part-time private practice. A native midwesterner, he obtained his bachelor's and master's degrees in social work from Indiana University. He was a Fellow in the Post-Master's Training Program in Clinical Social Work at the Menninger Foundation, Topeka, Kansas, and earned his doctorate in clinical social work theory and research from the Boston College Graduate School of Social Work. Jennifer M. Bonovitz, Ph.D., is in the private practice of clinical social work and psychoanalysis in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania and is a guest faculty member of the Philadelphia Psychoanalytic Institute and the Faculty Institute of the Pennsylvania Clinical Social Work Society. Born in Dublin, Ireland, Dr. Bonovitz earned her Bachelor of Arts and Diploma of Social Work from the University of Sydney, Australia. She received her M.S.W. from the Smith College School for Social Work, which she attended on a Fulbright Scholarship, and her doctorate from the Bryn Mawr College Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research. She is a graduate of the Philadelphia Psychoanalytic Institute, the first social worker ever accepted to this program.