The Facilitating Partnership A Winnicottian Approach for Social Workers and Other Helping Professionals

In The Facilitating Partnership, Jeffrey Applegate and Jennifer Bonovitz show how D. W. Winnicott's therapeutic ideas and technique are particularly relevant to an agency-based psychodynamic treatment of clients whose histories of deprivation and trauma have made them unlikely - and reluctant - candidates for in-depth clinical services. Winnicott's concepts are especially powerful in capturing the "silent," supportive, sustaining, relationship-based dimensions of clinical work and the authors provide an accessible language for explicating these invaluable activities. Through extensive case vignettes, Applegate and Bonovitz demonstrate that interventions emerging from Winnicott's key concepts - the good-enough mother, the holding environment - can bolster clients' ego strengths and coping capacities while promoting their psychosocial development in ways that help them profoundly alter maladaptive life patterns.

Jeffrey S. Applegate, D.S.W. is a member of the faculty of the Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research, Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.