Semadar, an experienced social worker, wrote the intervention story that forms the core of this chapter for the purpose of a professional consultation in the framework of group supervision. She read the text aloud to the group. The question on which she wanted consultation was not rhetorical, but practical: how do you deal with a family in which children are at risk, with whom all previous attempts to assist have not fared well? When I heard Semadar, I felt that the rhetoric of the text – the specific words that she chose to describe the family – revealed a difficulty in their relationship. Although there was no doubt that the children's situation was worrying, I was concerned about Semadar's difficulty in presenting the family in a way that would reveal both the subjectivity of each of its members and the complexity of the context of their life. After Semadar finished reading the text, we analysed it in the group, noting the principles of writing a critical intervention story. During the week before our next meeting, I commented on Semadar's text and she rewrote it, giving consideration to my comments.

This chapter is based on that supervision and on the later use that I made of the text for the purposes of teaching and training. The chapter includes three versions of that text: the first is the original version written by Semadar that already includes the comments I wrote to her after the first discussion; the second version is the corrected version that Semadar wrote; and the third version was written by me in light of the new information that arose in our second discussion. In addition, the chapter outlines the guidelines for writing a critical psychosocial report.

Introduction

One of the basic ideas of the PAP is simple: professionals constantly need to make an effort to recognise the subjectivity of the people they work with, to view service users as complete people and to bring this recognition to the relationship. In order to recognise service users’ subjectivity, one has to also acknowledge the context of poverty in which they live. Therefore, we have subjectivity, on the one hand, and the context of poverty, on the other.