Andrew Cooper

Hearing the grass grow: Emotional and epistemological challenges of practice-near research

This paper discusses the concept of practice-near research in terms of the emotional and epistemological challenges that arise from the researcher coming ‘near’ enough to other people for psychological processes to ensue. These may give rise in the researcher to confusion, anxiety and doubt about who is who and what is what; but also to the possibility of real emotional and relational depth in the research process. Using illustrations from three social work doctoral research projects undertaken by students at the Tavistock Clinic and the University of East London the paper examines four themes that seem to the author to be central to meaningful practice-near research undertaken in a spirit of true emotional and epistemological open-mindedness: the smell of the real; losing our minds; the inevitability of personal change; and the discovery of complex particulars.

Keeping our heads: Preserving therapeutic values in a time of change

This paper offers a discursive overview of the present state of therapeutic social work in Britain today, and locates this in the context of political and ideological struggles over the nature of the profession in the last two decades. Therapeutic social work has often been contrasted with more politically driven models of practice, but the author suggests that it is now a political task to defend and promote these practices and perspectives. Consistent with the principles underpinning therapeutic practice, practitioners are posited as individually and collectively indebted to one another and to their teachers for the skills they have, and recognition of this is what might bind us into a community capable of fighting to preserve what we value. This paper was given as the opening address at the Therapeutic Social Work Today conference, held at the Tavistock Clinic in 2001.

Welfare: dead, dying or just transubstantiated?

Andrew Cooper argues that welfare as we have previously known it is being dissolved; and coming to terms with the new forms it is taking requires a serious effort of understanding.

A Short Psychosocial History of British Child Abuse and Protection: Case Studies in Problems of Mourning in the Public Sphere

This paper offers a historical and psychosocial account of ‘moral panics’ about child maltreatment in England over the last four decades, and proposes this perspective as additional to Munros more systemic account of the same history. The formal child protection system is theorised in terms of an explicit and a covert dual primary task. The overt task is to actually protect vulnerable children and prevent abuse; the covert task is to protect the remainder of society from exposure to anxiety provoking ‘dangerous knowledge’ about the prevalence of child maltreatment. Episodes of public and political moral panic occur when the boundaries of containment provided by the official system and its processes are breached, propelling debate and contestation about child maltreatment into the public sphere, where public enquiries and other social mechanisms are called upon to ‘settle’ the contested issues. Sometimes these social settlements appear to be successful in resolving conflicts about the reality or otherwise of specific forms of abuse; in other cases, especially child deaths, the controversial and anxiety-laden nature of the problem is recurrently projected back into the public domain. The paper suggests that this may be associated with a difficulty about establishing a secure symbolic framework or discourse in society for the emotionally indigestible facts of child torture and murder. In turn, this may be associated with problems about the decline of public mourning rituals and the failure of the public enquiry format to facilitate this. In line with Munro, the paper argues for the importance of a tragic perspective on child maltreatment, to counter idealisations of the capacity of the formal system to protect children.

History as tragedy, never as farce: tracing the long cultural narrative of child protection in England

As parents, we hand on the best and worst of ourselves to our children, and much more in between. Philip Larkin’s famous poem, best known for its startling opening line ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad’ recalls only the damage done, the intergenerational erosion of joy and potential stemming from bad parenting that ‘deepens like a coastal shelf’. As a society, we create conditions in which different childhoods can be lived out. We say that smacking children is OK, or not. We recognise and respond to the prevalence of sexual abuse and exploitation in ordinary families, or not. We do something about child trafficking, or not. These social conditions evolve, but slowly and ambivalently, suffer reversals of fortune, and vary widely among nation states and across continents. However, if one test of civilised development in a nation were to examine its treatment of child welfare professionals, then Britain, and especially England, would fare badly. Social workers have been taking a public beating in England for 40 years in a manner unknown in any other country, and the haemorrhaging has spread, so there is now a crisis in paediatric recruitment and other child medical specialities. Few want to risk their careers against the possibility of a public lynching for failing to ask the right questions about a child who ends up on the mortuary slab a few days later. This crisis is just one symptom of the long, complex cultural narrative of child maltreatment and child protection work in Britain that has been profoundly shaped by recurrent episodes of moral panic and febrile media scandal mongering, usually centring on individual cases of child death. The Cleveland crisis of 1987 was different, and marked a radical, though highly contested turning point in our recognition of the prevalence of intra-familial child sexual abuse. Moral panics over ‘Satanic abuse’ followed in its wake, and then the ‘recovered memory’ wars. The North Wales and Leicestershire ‘pindown’ inquiries disclosed systematic institutional abuse to be an uncomfortably widespread phenomenon. Child protection policy and practice in Britain is an uneasy settlement between reactions to these events, the pendulum swings of family policy and government ideology, and obstinately ambivalent attitudes towards children and childhood in the wider society.

Psychoanalysis and the Politics of Organizational Theory

This article enquires into the absence of any relationship between the psychoanalytic tradition of organizational theory and the mainstream sociology of institutions and organizations. The importance of a fuller engagement between psychoanalytic and sociological understandings of organizational life is explored with reference to the intersection between socially constructed defences in social work and the wider political climate of attacks on the profession. Open systems theory is most often deployed within the psychoanalytic tradition to conceptualize the interplay between organizations and their social environment. Thus, the article argues that there is an implicit sociology within psychoanalytic theorizations of organizational life, but that a fuller engagement with available and compatible social theory would both enrich and problematize this body of work. This potential is examined in relation to some of the work of Talcott Parsons, which in turn reveals the reductionist tendencies in the psychoanalytic tradition of organizational theory.

‘Be Quiet and Listen’: Emotion, Public Policy and Social Totality

We all inhabit a world of lived experience that is shaped, more or less directly, by policy and policy makers. Our daily experience as commuters, parents, children, citizens, consumers, patients, learners, teachers, neighbours and workers cannot be rendered fully legible without a framework of analysis that discloses its policy-embedded nature. But policy processes have usually not been interrogated for the manner in which they shape and are shaped by the experiences and relationships of policy actors as they trigger, interpret, resist, comply or ignore the currents of policy change that help constitute their own and others’ life worlds.

INTRODUCTION: ‘DIALOGUES AND DEVELOPMENTS IN SOCIAL WORK PRACTICE: APPLYING SYSTEMIC AND PSYCHOANALYTIC IDEAS IN REAL WORLD CONTEXTS’

The papers that follow were presented as part of a day conference in November 2005 at which social work practitioners, managers and educators who had undertaken postqualifying training at the Tavistock Clinic sought to establish a dialogue between psychoanalytic and systemic ways of thinking and practising. Over the years there have been various efforts at creative exchange between these perspectives by social work theorists, of which Preston-Shoot and Agass (1990) is one of the best. But live dialogic encounters are less common, and the day provoked considerable interest and an atmosphere of thoughtful intensity. One of the paradoxes which emerged was the realisation that perhaps the internal organisational conversation between systematic and psychoanalytic perspectives within the Tavistock Clinic was less advanced than among those who attended the conference from multi-disciplinary ‘front line settings’. In other words, the guests turned out to have much to teach the hosts about how to throw a good party. In the current climate, when the principles of the welfare state are under threat and we face ever-increasing demands to measure our work in simplified ways, it is more crucial than ever to ensure that we can defend and sustain complexity. An important way to do so is through bringing a number of different perspectives to bear on our work. However, enabling creative dialogue between different perspectives is challenging in any circumstances. In times of uncertainty, many of us are prone to revert to familiar beliefs and practices as touchstones, or even as claims of identity. In such conditions we are less than receptive to others’ view and are most at risk of polarising our differences and taking up oppositional positions. Some years ago a research study was carried out in North America of groups working in research laboratories with the aim of exploring what factors contributed to the productivity and creativity of a team (Dunbar, 1995). The study found that teams which included members with different disciplines and perspectives were the most inventive and effective. It concluded that such diversity enabled a team to maintain curiosity about those occurrences which did not ‘fit’ with the dominant hypotheses and ideas and thus led to the development (discovery) of important new thinking. This idea of the usefulness of multiple perspectives is central to a systemic theoretical

A Good Death

This paper offers some personal reflections on the idea of ‘a good death’, a theme in the writing of philosophers since classical times. The hospice movement has made immense progress in creating conditions in which we can ‘die better’. But such experiences are still the exception rather than the rule. The psychological challenge is how to relate to the dying as they are dying, and how as we die we relate to the living. I reflect on my own experience of my father’s death, and a moment of fleeting but genuine contact between us. Atul Gawande’s idea of the ‘hard conversations’ we must learn to have as we approach death are enlightening. Ultimately I argue, we die alone, and how we are, or are not, ‘held in mind’ as we approach death may be an index of the nearest we can approach to the idea of an ‘afterlife’.

Front line services, complexity, research and policy

The evidence-based culture of modern mental health policy and service delivery is being extended through funded efforts to accelerate implementation of research findings in practice settings. In this paper, we argue that this linear model of research and policy-making is profoundly ill adapted to the nature of practice realities and real-world policy-making processes. Both need to be re-conceptualised using the theoretical and practical resources deriving from modern complexity theory. A short case study illustrates the nature of ‘complexity’, the reframing of the notion of ‘evidence’ it implies and the different relationship between research, practice and policy that flows from this more attuned model of mental health and therapeutic processes.