The goals, projects and plans are invitation of user to enter into
his or her life. And should be taken as invitations are – politely and
respectfully. However, this invitation may be issued for varying degrees of
entering the Life-World, or to put it clearly – various degrees of social work
intervention in one’s Life-World. The relationship can start and stop at level
of just representing the Life-Worlds in a talking encounter, which is usually
termed counselling. In this case, a social worker does not enter the realities
of the user.
Next degree is to enter into world actually lived by user by
providing support to user in specific activities (by informing, encouraging,
assisting the activity materially and morally but in the real contexts of one’s
Life-World, like it happens in what is called personal assistance or could be
termed “support-work”. When this is a case, the “supporter” enters the
Life-World of the user and for the moment of support becomes a part of it.
In the operation of “help” the “helper” acts from the position
outside the Life-World and brings into the field force not only originating but
being also anchored in the domain outside the user’s Life-World. This duplicity
of the positions creates a power relationship, in which the “helper” does not
only contribute to the activities of the “helped” but is “by doing things for
or instead” of the “helped”, adding actions of his own and from his own
position. In this action, a middle ground between the ordinary Life-World and
the institutional world is being generated, in which the user is still embedded
in his or her Life-World but is drawn into relationships where he or she loses
a degree of the sovereignty characteristic of Life-World. This intensity of
help is usually referred to as “casework”.
“Help” and “support” are essentially synonyms. Here we use the two
terms to denote a difference that in everyday parlance is negligible. “Support”
denotes an activity that upholds the activity of an actor by adding a force to
it without altering the direction or intention of the activity. In this
context, we define “help” as a force in the field that operates as a vector,
thus contributing to the activity of the actor but introducing an extra
dimension to it and thus, however slightly, changing its direction and adding
to its intention. In the terms of mechanics, support is a “scalar” and help is
a “vector”.
When things get more complex, and especially if more input of the
institutional resources is needed, there is more organisation and coordination
involved – there are more “helpers” and “supporters” needed, the intensity of
intervention increases and reaches a new quality. This comprehensive taking care is often referred to as “care
management” and brings the social work action onto a level of organising. It
happens still mostly in the intermediate space between the Life-World and the
institutional world, but it is tangential to the latter by virtue of spanning
the whole arch of activities from the actors’ finalities of Life-World across
the various degrees of intensity of the help.
The most intense social work intervention[1]
into the Life-World is taking somebody from his or her environment and
relocating it to some, usually readymade institutional space. This is usually
called “institutional care” or in a post-institutional setting “residential
care”. Here, the person is up-rooted from his or her Life-World and transferred
to a simulacrum of it.
This progression of intensities of interventions can be seen as a
series of non-corporeal transformations of space as well as relationships
situated in it, and of respective professional and user roles. The space
transforms from an ideatory space of Life-World representations, “theoretical
context” in Freirean terms, created in an interpersonal encounter, into
blending of the social worker with the user’s Life-World, bridging the
institutional space with the personal, to making “a dome” of care to the
artificial institutional space. The work relationships thus formed range from a
free exchange of ideas that bear no immediate consequence in the Life-World
with a usual goal of reflecting the Life-World, getting an insight and creating
a new orientation to a relationship where the provider of care takes a person
in charge and is basically, even if not legally a guardian relationship. In
between, there are relationships of companionship in action in one’s
Life-World, power relationship resulting in and out of help and a relationship
of care brokerage between the Life-World and institutional realm.
Action
|
Level
|
Term
|
space
|
relationship
|
remedial
action
|
Talking
|
Representation
|
Counselling
|
ideatory
|
reflective
|
reflexive thought + mutuality,
symmetry of exchange
|
Supporting
|
Deeds (action)
|
Personal assistance
(Support-work)
|
Life-World
|
companionship in
action
|
user perspective
|
Helping
|
Power
|
Casework
|
Life-World –
institutional space bridge
|
empowerment
|
|
Caring
|
Organisation
|
Care management
|
institutional “dome”
over the Life-World
|
broker
|
self-management,
re-appropriation of institutional resources
|
Placing
|
Shift in space
|
Residential care
|
institutional
|
guardian
|
temporary and
personalisation of the space
|
In the progression of the intensity of intervention, we can observe
two very strong tendencies. One is related to the power drop caused by power
differential introduced by the professional and the very idea and process of help.
The other, concurrent with losing power is one of losing ground, being uprooted
from the Life-World. This de-territorialisation can have a productive result in
increasing the capacity of improving one’s life – by expanding the view of
reflection, by expanding manoeuvre space, gaining autonomy of everyday
Life-World and by providing access to the goods of the institutional space.
However, it may lead to progressive exclusion from meaningful relations,
estrangement from one’s home and community. This upscaling of help stages a
series of metamorphoses – non-corporeal mutations, that cease to be not merely
situational (as they are usually in everyday life) and lead to progressive objectification
into an institutional object. The path to
hell is paved by good intentions.
The intentions, in social work, are good indeed. Even the results
need not to be catastrophic, but quite benign. However, this is not enough to
undo the underlying processes of losing power and ground. Good news is that
social work has an arsenal of antidotes to these “iatrogenic” harms. Just as in
everyday interaction there has to be a remedial
action to each hazard of losing ground and power capacity.
One is the conscience of Life-World being the point of departure and
return. Not only because it is a criteria of social work intervention, as
described above, but also because of the basic finalism of support, in which
the intervention takes place. We need to keep in mind that we are dealing with
activity, which is by definition purposeful that has its goal (by default
specific, in general, to improve one’s life conditions) and this is the point
of common action. Therefore, acquiring and consistently applying the “user’s
perspective” is the main way of fending of the negative corollaries of social
work intervention.
There are diverse types of remedial action regarding the hazard of
each degree of intensity. Even at the least intruding action of representation,
since it takes off from the Life-World, is an act of de-territorialisation,
there is a danger of skewing the vision by importing the ideas via
representation into person’s living world (Freire – invasion). Dialogic
precautions have to be made in order to eschew them by critical and reflexive
stance, as well as with mutuality and symmetry of the exchange.
Empowerment is a general antidote to losing power immanent to
different degrees in social work intervention. If helping diminishes the power
of the help, the power must be “measured” at the completion of intervention to
assure that “the patient is not dead after successful operation” and to design
the remedial action to restore power beyond the side effects of helping.
In coordinated care, it is important to observe all the hazards
being uprooted and not in control of one’s life that come up on the levels of
lesser intensity and integrate them in specific of this intensity. Special
concern must be made about symmetry, critical thought, user’s perspective and
empowerment at all stages of planning and coordinating care. However, specific
to this intensity is the imperative of “self-management”, being in charge of
one’s care and the influx of the means from institutional resources should not
be treated as a state charity but as an of re-appropriation of the public good.
Displacement should be omitted at all cost (and erased as a panergic
and paramount response to distress). When necessary, as in family violence, or
need for safe haven etc. it must be as short as possible temporary solution,
preserving the connections to one’s usual Life-World, with intense work on
lower intensities of intervention to enable the return to it. In the case when
the return is not possible a maximum of personalisation of the new place (i.e.
creating a new home) should be enabled, as it is the case when people move
their home from one environment to the other in the ordinary life.
This five-gear shift of intensities in social work, inter alia,
demonstrates the ability and necessity of social work to traverse and connect the
Life-World (concrete) and institutional (abstract) planes. In doing so, it
creates crevices into what would otherwise be solid construction with no
interim space between the two. The “Life-World” of social work is in these
cracks of the social construction. The critical moments of transitions induce
the necessity of social work.
[1] Of all the other social work interventions removal of legal
capacity matches this intensity. As it happens these two interventions –
displacement and disqualification – often take place simultaneously, as a part
of the same combined operation. However, in principle they are two distinctive
doings. In one, the subject of the operation can remain in his place, but is
“deterritorialised” by inability to inscribe into meaningful dealings, in the
other deterritorialisation is by necessity a physical one.
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