Harnessing the inspiration available from the arts and the imagination brings to life sensitive and effective social work practice. Workers feel most satisfied while service users and communities are more likely to benefit when creative thinking can be applied to practice dilemmas. Drawing on contributions from Canada, England and Utrecht this book illustrates the transforming effect of creatively applied thinking to social problems. The first part of the book considers how use of the self can be enhanced by analytic reflection and application to difficulties facing individuals and communities. The second part shows psychodynamic theory to be a valuable aid when thinking about issues faced by social workers facing threats and accusations, therapeutic work with children and restorative youth justice. The third part of the book considers the implications of working with the arts in community settings – an ex-mining community in North West England, the Tate Gallery in London and the ‘cultural capital’ of Liverpool. Taken as a whole these chapters combine to inspire and provoke thought of how the arts and the imagination can be used creativity to help service users confronted by problems with living and the workers who attempt to get alongside them to think about these. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Social Work Practice.

This is the first book ever to be published on arts use in social work. Bringing together theoretical connections between arts and social work, and with practice examples of arts in micro and macro social work practice from around the world, the book aims to inspire the reader with new ideas. It provides specific skills, defines what is social rather than fine or projective art use, and explains the theoretical connection between art and social work. It has chapters from all over the world, showing how arts are adjusted to different cultural contexts. Section I explores the theoretical connections between art and social work, including theories of resilience, empowerment, inclusion and creativity as they relate to art use in social work. Section II describes specific interventions with different populations. Each chapter also summarizes the skills and hands-on knowledge needed for social workers to use the practical elements of using arts for social workers not trained in these fields. The third section does the same for arts use in community work and as social change and policy. Using Art in Social Work Practice provides theoretical but also hands-on knowledge about using arts in social work. It extends the fields of both social work and arts therapy and serves as a key resource for students, academics and practitioners interested in gaining the theoretical understanding and specific skills for using social arts in social work, and for arts therapists interested in using social theories.

Written for social work students, this handbook describes more than 50 key social work skills. Using case studies and examples, the author demonstrates their creative application in evidence-based practice.

Artistry in Social Work Practice deals with the aesthetics of helping practice. Th ere is a focus on the features of artistry that give effectiveness to the work of assisting people with their problems in social living and improving their personal and communal welfare. Consideration is given to such elements as the use of self, form, relationships, creativity, communication, style, performance, and to aesthetic and spiritual experiences as part of the helping process. This book is an alert to the much neglected but crucial artistic aspect of social work. Max Siporin, a long time innovator in thinking about social work, calls practitioners to engage more deeply the aesthetic, creative, dynamic, symbolic, and spiritual qualities of our helping relationships and transformative activities. Ed R. Canda This is a book that has been badly needed in social work. Siporin has given the artistic dimension of social work practice its just due. It is a practice that can be done with a creativity, skill, style, and wisdom which achieve a helping experience that is a thing of beauty. Ed Sherman

This book provides a unique and highly topical application of psychoanalytic theory to the broad context of education, including schools, universities, and adult learning. Education is understood as a crucial element in a lifelong project to gain more coherent and meaningful understanding of self and others. Psychoanalysis has taken the contingency, construction, and development of human subjectivity, as well as the difficulty of thinking, to be its prime preoccupation. Yet - at a time of increasing doubt and anxiety about the purposes and practice of education - psychoanalytic understanding, from various traditions, has never been more marginal in educational debate. The book seeks, in these terms, to bridge some of this gap: it is written for teachers, trainers, policy-makers, clinicians, researchers, and diverse academics who want to look beyond bland superficialities to deeper struggles for self and understanding. This includes unconscious processes in the relationships that constitue education as well as resistance to new ideas and practices.

In the first dedicated analysis of its kind, international experts review the rationale and results of arts-based approaches to research, teaching, and practice in social work. The book presents examples of their use and methods to evaluate and theorise results and shows how arts can form outputs from research too.

In Dreaming, Healing and Imaginative Arts Practice, Kathleen Anne Connellan brings dream theory together with art practice and art psychotherapy to demonstrate how releasing the imagination can open-up processes of healing. In this interdisciplinary and richly innovative book, Connellan focuses on nocturnal dreams, day dreams, memory and reverie, and she explores how to access, depict and use these dream images to discover personal healing. Unlike other dream journals, Connellan encourages visual recording and personal experimentation with a variety of materials and modalities, regardless of artistic ability. Each chapter is divided into a theoretical and practical half, where the theoretical section addresses the foundations of dream theory and philosophy, and the practical section offers step-by-step exercises that lead you to the creation of something restorative. Connellan covers a theme in each chapter which helps merge the unconscious with the conscious: the nature of dreaming and the constitution of the psyche, the archetype and our shadow selves, belonging, moving, pain and pleasure, and all the senses in remembering. Dreaming, Healing and Imaginative Arts Practice is a unique blend of scholarly research, beautiful illustration and hands-on practicality that allows the reader to interpret their dreams for self-expression and self-knowledge. This work will be of great interest to those studying post-graduate psychology, social work, art and arts therapy, and an essential resource for art therapists, creative therapists, alternative psychotherapists and social workers in practice and in training.