Unfaithful Angels Quotes

“Efforts to reform social work appear invariably to fail because they are based on the assumption that social work can maintain the great duality with which it has struggled for decades: clinical practice versus social reform. We believe that these two objectives are irreconcilable.”
― Harry Specht, Unfaithful Angels: How Social Work Has Abandoned its Mission

“a modern community, social services are offered to everyone, not only the poor. There was a time in our not-too-distant past when universal public school education, playgrounds, and public health measures were considered to be radical ideas, and these programs were only for poor people. Better-off people purchased these services on their own. But over time, it was discovered that these services were good for the entire community. Public school education in the twentieth century has served as the major institution for integrating the great masses of immigrants into American society, providing opportunities for upward social mobility never before known, and as an enormous force for democratizing the American community.”
― Harry Specht, Unfaithful Angels: How Social Work Has Abandoned its Mission

“community-based system of social care will be universal—that is, available to everyone; comprehensive—providing on one site, all of the kinds of social services required by an urban community; accessible—easily reached by all people in the area designated as the service area; and accountable—with community residents having a prominent role in making policy for the service and overseeing its implementation.1 Social services organized in this way have been referred to by different names;2 we will designate them community service centers.”
― Harry Specht, Unfaithful Angels: How Social Work Has Abandoned its Mission

“CSWE’s standards for accreditation stipulate that schools must have required classroom courses in the content areas of social policy and programs, methods of practice, human growth and development in the social environment, and research. In addition, there is a requirement for a practicum of at least 900 hours in which the students practice in the field. As a result of the political clout within the profession of racial minorities, lesbians, gays, women, and clinical social workers, there are requirements that there be sufficient content about these groups. There are no requirements for any content about the poor and deprived, or dependent children, or the mentally ill, or the frail aged. Nor is there any requirement that students complete courses on the family, the publicly supported social services, community work, work with groups, or the law. Thus, CSWE leaves rather large gaps in the education of professional social workers.”
― Harry Specht, Unfaithful Angels: How Social Work Has Abandoned its Mission

“In fact, it is arguable that the growing influence of private practitioners within the profession has contributed to the tendency of the profession over the past twenty years to use more of its political clout to push for licensure and vendorship privileges for clinicians than for services to the needy or for better working conditions for public agency social workers. A study by Timothy Lause of the number-one legislative priorities of NASW state chapters during the late 1970s indicates that twothirds of these priorities concerned licensure or third-party payments, while only one-third had to do with social problemsolving policies and services.”
― Harry Specht, Unfaithful Angels: How Social Work Has Abandoned its Mission

“Dr. Jules Coleman of the University of Colorado Medical School in 1947 suggested that social casework involved a more “far-reaching respect of person than is found in psychiatry, or, for that matter, medicine and lamented the worship of psychotherapy by caseworkers: The caseworker has good reason to be beguiled by the lures of psychotherapy, to seize upon the points of similarity and to skim lightly over the gulfs of difference, particularly if the practice of psychotherapy is unwisely and unthinkingly accorded undue prestige values. As if the practice of casework did not suffice! As if doing psychotherapy made the caseworker a better and more valuable person!53 In the same year, long before the private practice of psychotherapy would become a major trend in social work practice, Ruth Smalley expressed the fears of many in the field regarding the fascination with psychotherapy: “A blight which is in danger of falling on the profession of social work is a lack of confidence and respect for itself. It is almost as though it thinks that it can find dignity, status, and helpfulness only by becoming something it is not.”
― Harry Specht, Unfaithful Angels: How Social Work Has Abandoned its Mission

“It is no wonder that social work, which inevitably confronts its practitioners with disquieting social phenomena that belie the expressive individualist myth and occasionally succeeds in confronting the general public with the same news, has been granted low status by society and has seen many of its best opt for a redefinition of their professional role into something more socially and financially rewarding and palatable.”
― Harry Specht, Unfaithful Angels: How Social Work Has Abandoned its Mission

“Although the aspiration of many social workers to have their own private practice is consistent with developments in other professions, there is something quirky about this lust for autonomy and solo practice in a profession whose traditional foundation and ethos lies in its commitment to, and expertise in, the creation of social approaches to solving the problems of individuals and groups.”
― Harry Specht, Unfaithful Angels: How Social Work Has Abandoned its Mission

“In 1957, the National Association of Social Workers’ (NASW) Commission on Social Work Practice developed a definition of social work private practice and proposed interim minimum standards, thereby suggesting that private practice was within the realm of professional social work. By 1964, the NASW had adopted minimum standards for private practice and officially recognized it as a legitimate area of social work, while affirming that “practice within socially sponsored organizational structures must remain the primary avenue for the implementation of the goals of the profession.”48”
― Harry Specht, Unfaithful Angels: How Social Work Has Abandoned its Mission

“When asked why they had entered private practice, the primary reasons given had to do with limitations imposed on their casework practice by agency policies, the incompatibility of agency schedules with family responsibilities, and the fact that they were made able to do so by support from psychiatrists, supervisors, and other colleagues. Increased income was also mentioned as an important factor contributing to the move to private practice.44”
― Harry Specht, Unfaithful Angels: How Social Work Has Abandoned its Mission

“There is a dark subtext to this message that seldom finds direct expression. Those who suffer most directly the effects of social problems—the poor, the homeless, abused children, the frail aged, and the chronically mentally ill—often have the fewest personal resources at their disposal to allow them, in the words of the psychotherapeutic ego psychologists, to “adapt” by finding a “better environment.” For these people, the self-esteem message either falls on deaf ears (if they have some perspective on the social forces contributing to their plight), or it contributes to the generally false hope that merely a change of mind will lift them out of their problems. This false hope harkens back to the promises of magic, religion, faith healing, and the power of positive thinking. It also contributes to the lack of faith in collective approaches to problem solving. Those who do not suffer as directly from social ills (generally middle- and upper-class whites) receive a different message from the self-esteemers. They are told that it is not only acceptable but a sign of good emotional health for them to be preoccupied with matters of self-perfection. Furthermore, the idea that all difficulties originate within the individual helps to mitigate any feelings of guilt or even concern that the more fortunate might have regarding their responsibility to do anything about social problems: “It’s not my problem!”
― Harry Specht, Unfaithful Angels: How Social Work Has Abandoned its Mission

“The radical therapists of the 1960s and 1970s provided a somewhat more pointed sociological argument than Veroff and associates in describing the growth and social function of psychotherapy.55 They argued that psychotherapy was essentially a mechanism of social control used by capitalism to mystify people as to the true cause of their problems and to reduce dissent. Psychotherapy is seen as having developed from its “guilds” (psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, and social workers), which seek to divide up the therapeutic pie. They claim that the individualistic psychotherapy commonly practiced in this country is ill suited to meet the real needs of poor people and ethnic minorities.”
― Harry Specht, Unfaithful Angels: How Social Work Has Abandoned its Mission

“We will find that psychotherapy has increasingly replaced our reliance on magic and faith in organizing our experience of the world. In the process, psychotherapy has come to reinforce a particularly American faith in the perfectibility of the individual, thereby contributing to our tendency to treat public issues as private troubles.”
― Harry Specht, Unfaithful Angels: How Social Work Has Abandoned its Mission

“Social workers should not be secular priests in the church of individual repair; they should be the caretakers of the conscience of the community. They should not ask, “Does it feel good to you?” They should help communities create good.”
― Harry Specht, Unfaithful Angels: How Social Work Has Abandoned its Mission

“The major function of social work is concerned with helping people perform their normal life tasks by providing information and knowledge, social support, social skills, and social opportunities; it is also concerned with helping people deal with interference and abuse from other individuals and groups, with physical and mental disabilities, and with overburdening responsibilities they have for others. Most important, social work’s objective is to strengthen the community’s capacities to solve problems through development of groups and organizations, community education, and community systems of governance and control over systems of social care. The concern of psychotherapy is with helping people to deal with feelings, perceptions, and emotions that prevent them from performing their normal life tasks because of impairment or insufficient development of emotional and cognitive functions that are intimately related to the self. Social workers help people make use of and develop community and social resources to build connections with others and reduce alienation and isolation; psychotherapists help people to alter, reconstruct, and improve the self.”
― Harry Specht, Unfaithful Angels: How Social Work Has Abandoned its Mission

“psychotherapy in general and strongly opposed to its use as the major mode of social work practice, we begin with the assumption that both social work and psychotherapy serve important functions in modern life, although neither is fulfilling these functions very well. We believe that social work has abandoned its mission to help the poor and oppressed and to build communality. Instead, many social workers are devoting their energies and talents to careers in psychotherapy. A significant proportion of social work professionals—about 40 percent—are in private practice, serving middle-class clients.,”
― Harry Specht, Unfaithful Angels: How Social Work Has Abandoned its Mission