Suchergebnisse

This paper presents an approach to crisis intervention and brief treatment for young children based on the new psychology, intrapsychic humanism. After presenting central theoretical principles, these principles are applied and treatment guidelines demonstrated in the treatment process of a three-year-old child named Paul. The research design for the case study is naturalistic uses qualitative methods of data analysis, and draws from the heuristic paradigm (a postpositivist metatheory of social and behavioral research).

Residential care is increasingly recognized as an invaluable therapeutic resource for homeless, severely mentally ill, and substance-abusing clients. However, those managers and staff seeking to provide residential care can be perplexed by the communications of these clients and would benefit from a conceptual framework for planning psychosocial interventions to address these clients' diverse problems. This paper describes how a comprehensive psychology-intrapsychic humanism-can be used as a flexible, consistent guide for serving this population in residential care. Based on a central principle that staff-client relationships can be a path to healing, intrapsychic humanism's other precepts include treatment planning that recognizes clients' conflicting motives and strengthens their constructive motives, understanding clients' self-destructive responses to positive experiences, and helping clients govern their self-destructive behavior while enhancing their self-respect.

Social work today faces a crucial watershed: Will the field continue to promulgate unsound and detrimental beliefs about social work research and knowledge, or will the field fully embrace the heuristic paradigm and thereby realize its true potential as a first-rate science committed to humanistic ideals? Proponents of unsound and detrimental beliefs have obscured the choice for social workers by systematically and thoroughly misrepresenting the heuristic paradigm, making unwarranted and misleading claims for the paradigms to which it is opposed (logical empiricism and relativism), and confusing the issues at stake for the field. Accordingly, this article helps social workers recognize the tenets and implications of each of the three paradigms for research that social work has available to it—the heuristic paradigm, logical empiricism, and relativism—so that social workers can make a truly informed choice about the best approach to knowledge in their field.

Forensic social work can bridge the gap between the criminal justice and mental health systems and serve clients who "fall between the cracks." The authors describe theoretical and clinical issues, utilizing case examples and the literature to develop a conceptual paradigm for the role of social workers in this area.