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

This text concentrates on key Winnicottian concepts that are suited to agency-based social work-practice with people whose psychological well-being has been compromised by acute disruption or trauma, psychological disturbance, or early environmental deprivation.

In The Facilitating Partnership, Jeffrey Applegate and Jennifer Bonovitz show how D. W. Winnicott''s therapeutic ideas and technique are particularly relevant to an agency-based psychodynamic treatment of clients whose histories of deprivation and trauma have made them unlikely - and reluctant - candidates 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 concepts - the good-enough mother, the holding environment - can bolster clients'' ego strengths and coping capacities while promoting their psychosocial development in ways that help them profoundly alter maladaptive life patterns.