Professional written voice “in flux”: the case of social work

Contemporary professional social work can be characterised by increased textualisation (after Iedema, Rick & Hermine Scheeres. 2003. From doing work to talking work: Renegotiating knowing, doing and identity. Applied Linguistics 24(3). 316–337) with written texts mediating most action. At the same time, writing, as a key dimension to social workers’ practice and labour, is often institutionally unacknowledged, becoming visible primarily when identified as a “problem.” This paper draws on a three year nationally funded UK-based research project to offer a situated account of contemporary professional social work writing, challenging dominant institutional orientations to writing in professional practice. The paper outlines the specific ways in which social work practices, including writing, can be characterised as being ‘in flux’. Drawing on ethnographic data and adopting a Bakhtinian (Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. Discourse in the novel. In Michael Holquist (ed.), The dialogic imagination. Four essays by M. Bakhtin, trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist, 259–422. Austin: University of Texas Press; and Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1986. The problem of speech genres. In Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist (eds.), Speech genres and other late essays, trans. V. W. McGee, 60–102. Austin: University of Texas Press) oriented approach to voice, the paper explores the entextualisation of three specific social work texts, focusing in particular on critical moments (after Candlin, Christopher N. 1987. Explaining moments of conflict in discourse. In Ross Steele & Terry Treadgold (eds.), Language topics: Essays in honour of Michael Halliday, 413–429. Amsterdam: John Benjamins; Candlin, Christopher N. 1997. General editor’s preface. In Britt Louise Gunnarsson, Per Linell & Bengt Nordberg (eds.), The construction of professional discourse, viii–xiv. London: Longman). These critical moments offer insights into key problematics of social work writing, in particular the tensions around professional voice and discourse. The paper concludes by arguing for an articulation of professional social work writing which takes account of the dialogic nature of language and the discoursal challenges experienced in everyday practice.

PERMISSION TO WRITE

In this narrative auto-ethnographic paper, I experiment with a version of “post-academic” writing. I explore how I could improve and develop my craft as a narrative inquirer and strengthen my written voice as an expression of my practitioner-researcher autonomy. I tell the story of two writers, myself and Laura, my student, by bringing us as characters into the same story. We are both students of writing and in the process of developing our thinking and awareness of educational experience through our writing. We use writing as inquiry, as a method, and our texts emerge from the shared storytelling world of language counselling. We both experiment with personal reflective writing as a way of claiming ownership of this open-ended writing practice and of expressing our autonomy. In this paper, I give glimpses of our stories with a view to how Laura’s story worked on me as a practitioner-researcher and a scholarly writer.

From the writing cure to the talking cure: Revisiting the French ‘discovery of the unconscious’

It is often said that the advent of the Freudian talking cure around 1900 revolutionised the psychiatric setting by giving patients a voice. Less known is that for decades prior to the popularisation of this technique, several researchers had been experimenting with another, written practice aimed at probing the mind. This was particularly the case in France. Alongside neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot’s spectacular staging of hypnotised bodies, ‘automatic writing’ became widely used in fin-de-siècle clinics and laboratories, with French psychologists regularly asking entranced patients to scribble down words to validate their nascent theories on the divided self. This article traces the emergence of automatic writing in French psychological discourse at the close of the 19th century. By focusing on the early work of Dr Pierre Janet and some of his contemporaries, it re-examines the role played by this practice in what Henri Ellenberger famously called ‘The Discovery of the Unconscious’. It also considers the various levels of reconstruction at play in recent historical accounts. What does it mean to give subjects a (written) voice? How does automatic writing differ from the Freudian talking cure as respective expressions of the unspeakable? And how might these questions inform future historical practice?