In a supervision meeting, Liat presented her work with a single mother, who had approached her at a time of crisis when the woman's landlord asked her to vacate her apartment. Liat met regularly with the woman over a period of about 18 months, during which time she helped her to find another apartment and to process the ongoing experience of eviction, isolation and alienation that had accompanied her throughout her life, and was aggravated by the landlord's decision. Their sessions together helped the woman to gradually regain her trust in the world and to temper the aggressive behaviour that she had been using to protect herself for years. Although I viewed this as therapeutic work, the social worker summed up her presentation by saying: “This was not therapy because we did not focus on the woman's childhood, but dealt with the emotions that arose concerning her daily hardships.” The question is, therefore, what is therapy? Does it reside in what the service user brings? What is the connection between concrete assistance, for instance, helping to find an apartment, and emotional change processes? What are the curative elements in intervention? This chapter deals with these questions.

Introduction

My main argument is that in order to deal effectively with people living in poverty, that is, to become relevant to them, social workers need to develop a poverty-aware therapy stance. This stance is based on a combination of practices aimed at making a change in the external world and practices dealing with the inner world, with an emphasis on the various roles that power plays in both. The concept of ‘recognition’ was developed in the 1990s by philosophers of critical theory, especially Axel Honneth and Nancy Fraser, and simultaneously in relational and intersubjective psychology in the work of Stephen Mitchell, Lewis Aaron and Jessica Benjamin, and it is a key concept in this context.

My contention is that the existence or non-existence of a therapeutic stance depends on whether or not there is a relationship of recognition, and it is this stance that creates the therapy and not the specific content dealt with by the social worker and the service user. In other words, therapeutic situations can occur even in everyday situations, when using simple language and when talking about matters connected to concrete reality.