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In recent years, psychoanalysis has experienced a resurgence in popular discourse, what The New York Times (2023) described as “not your daddy’s Freud.” From the rising controversial storms over sexuality and gender to those surrounding race and U.S. empire, psychoanalysis remains a vital, if contested, framework for interpreting both psychic and social life. While often narrated as the domain of psychiatry and psychology, this revival obscures the constitutive role of psychoanalysis in shaping social work in the United States. The frameworks associated with Sigmund Freud and his interlocutors were not simply engaged by social work; they actively reworked the field. Although scholarship has begun to think about psychoanalysis’s role in the doing and theorizing of social work in the present, its formative uptake in the 1920s and 1930s remains insufficiently examined.
Methods
Primary sources for this analysis included materials from archives such as the American Philosophical Society and the New York State Archives; as well as the Proceedings of the National Conference of Social Work. The contents of three social work journals influential in the era: Social Service Review (1927~); The Family (1920~); and The Survey (1897-1952) were also reviewed. An expansive selection of primary source materials from key figures in twentieth century psychoanalysis and social work was also reviewed.
Findings
The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed the rapid diffusion of psychoanalytic thought across Western scientific and reform domains, reshaping medicine, psychology, and social work alike. The psychological turn in U.S. social work crystallized in the late 1920s around two competing schools of thought. The Freudian Diagnostic School, associated with Porter R. Lee and Marion E. Kenworthy, emphasized the enduring influence of unconscious past experience and focused on the treatment of pathology.
By contrast, the Functional School, led by Jessie Taft and Virginia Robinson at the University of Pennsylvania, drew on the work of Freud’s estranged student, Otto Rank, to foreground will, agency, and the immediacy of the therapeutic relationship. Rather than the Diagnostic approach to “treating the patient,” Functional practitioners emphasized “helping the client,” reframing therapeutic practice around relational process and present-centered change. This paper argues that the Functional School’s uptake of Rankian psychoanalysis, and Taft’s role as translator, biographer, and theorist, was foundational in shaping clinical social work’s distinctive epistemology and practice orientation.
Significance
Clinical social work’s contemporary engagement with psychoanalysis is not a recent development but is rooted in its formative history. By centering the Functional School, this paper surfaces a suppressed genealogy of clinical social work that complicates dominant narratives. This history not only repositions social work as a site of psychoanalytic production, but also illuminates the moral and political assumptions embedded in social work practice. In particular, the Functionalist emphasis on “helping” rather than “treating” reveals how claims to therapeutic benevolence can obscure relations of power, cementing both white and psychoanalytic innocence. Attending to these histories sharpens critical analysis of social work’s ongoing engagements with race, gender, and sexuality, and invites renewed scrutiny of the ethical and political stakes of therapeutic practice.