Existentialism and social work

Abstract

It has become fashionable in recent years when writing expository texts or for that matter novels, to use the genre of the travelogue as the media for the putting forward of one's ideas. Sheldon Kopp's, "If you meet the Buddha along the road, kill him," and Robert M. Pursig's, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" are two examples of the modern pilgrim's progress. Like Bunyan, each author seeks to explicate from the immediate and the personal, a system, a set of ideas, a moral stance from which the future and the impersonal may be reasonably viewed and acted upon. The medium of the journey provides both a participatory method and an empirical motherlode of experience and it is within these parameters that the dialectic of existence is played. I, albeit in a simpler and certainly more clumsy fashion, intend to use the same genre for this thesis. My reasons for doing so I shall outline below. Four years ago I began to practice as a Medical Social Worker in Auckland City. I worked from a hospital, Extramural Hospital, all of whose patients were in the community, there were no in-patients and the very few day-patients were seen on an appointment only basis. The task of the Social Worker was to keep these patients in the community by mobilising the necessary personal and welfare services, maintaining a continual liason with the patients' General Practicioner, who was officially responsible for the patient.