Care As Containment: Neumann, Foucault, and the Archetypal Politics of Social Work’s Relationship to Black Community Sovereignty

Background and Purpose

According to the NABSW, mainstream social work’s relationship to Black community sovereignty has been persistently colored by progressively more sophisticated forms of institutional containment. If such claims are to be taken seriously, then we, as a profession, are required to engage in a form of structural excavation that unearths the potential relationship between SW, institutional power, and the management of Black self-determination. This paper advances this effort via an archetypal and biopolitical archaeology of that relationship, suggesting that successive configurations of SW’s relation to Black-life sequence Neumannian’s successive archetypes of the disciplining Father, the partially individuating Hero, and the Great Mother in her competing elementary and transformative characters.

The central thesis: SW’s contemporary DEI apparatus predominantly enacts the elementary character of the Great Mother - a structured relation that genuinely nourishes while simultaneously containing Black community sovereignty within professionally managed boundaries-. Additionally, the transformative character, which propels communities toward genuine sovereign flourishing, cannot be actualized from within the logic of institutional reform, but requires SW to deliberately embrace the Black Radical Tradition as its primary epistemological and political foundation for liberative SW practice.

Methods

This paper employs an integrative theoretical framework combining Erich Neumann’s archetypal theory as expressed in The Great Mother (1955) and The Origins and History of Consciousness (1954), with Foucault’s analytics of sovereign, disciplinary, and biopower. In doing, Neumann’s archetypes provide/describe the structural character of each historical phase of SW’s relationship with the Black community, while Foucault’s power analytics describe the operational mechanisms deployed therein. The analysis draws on the Black Radical Tradition as theorized by Robinson (1983), Kelley (2002), and Fanon (1967), alongside post-Jungian Africanist correctives provided by Brewster’s scholarship. Historical and contemporary case examples — including Reconstruction-era mutual aid societies, the Black Panther Party’s survival programs, and Cooperation Jackson — ground the theoretical claims empirically.

Results

The analysis reveals three historical phases: paternal sovereign discipline of late nineteenth-century charity organization; the Hero’s incomplete individuation during the Civil Rights and empowerment eras; and the contemporary Great Mother phase, in which the DEI apparatus enacts elementary containment through four biopolitical mechanisms, each of which produces genuine goods while simultaneously containing the conditions of community sovereignty within institutionally managed frameworks.

Conclusions and Implications

This paper argues that social work stands at a structural bifurcation point between the elementary and transformative characters of the Great Mother. The transformative path requires recognizing the Black Radical Tradition as the primary epistemological authority for liberative practice, not a supplementary perspective. For practice, the implications include reorienting toward community sovereignty as the organizing telos, redistributive partnering over inclusive containment, epistemological pluralism rooted in community-generated knowledge, and institutional abdication as professional virtue. For policy, the analysis challenges accreditation bodies to interrogate the structural limits of DEI as an ethical foundation. For research, this framework invites inquiry into community-governed models of practice capable of advancing justice and democratic participation for varying communities independent of institutional mediation.