The Facilitating Partnership

InThe 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 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.A Jason Aronson Book

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. InThe 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 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.
A Jason Aronson Book

Part 1 PART I. WINNICOTT: PERSON, THEORIST, CLINICIAN
Chapter 2 Finding an Approach to Helping
Chapter 3 Winnicott's Developmental Theory
Chapter 4 Winnicott's Concepts of Vulnerability and Disturbance
Part 5 PART II. PRACTICE
Chapter 6 The Holding Environment
Chapter 7 Ego Relatedness
Chapter 8 The Transitional Process
Chapter 9 Object Relating and Object Use
Chapter 10 The True and False Self
Part 11 PART III. BROADER IMPLICATIONS
Chapter 12 The Good-Enough Social Worker