Constructing the Modern Worker: The Occluded Origins of Clinical Social Work

Background

The post-Civil War industrial boom that transformed the U.S. economy and drew masses of European immigration and the northward migration of Southern Blacks, further aggravated existing socio-economic inequalities and heightened civil discord and industrial unrest. Alongside shrill warnings about race suicide and the death of Americanism, predictions of an impending class warfare incited by the emergence of an assertive and politically powerful working class loomed large. This specter of “radicalism” was a significant force for many Progressive Era social workers in rationalizing collaboration with the industrial elite, even as they identified industrialization as the wellspring of the socioeconomic ills they fought to ameliorate.

In early 20^th century, a new approach to reforming sub-standard individuals emerged: Psychiatric social work (PSW), originally “psychopathic social work,” now “clinical social work” (CSW). This blend of social casework and psychiatry was founded by social worker Mary Jarrett and Harvard Neuropathology Professor, Elmer Southard, a leading eugenicist who

regarded eugenics as “the most important fundamental inquiry of the social service.” Though its origins are usually valorized as a response to the needs of "shell shocked” WWI soldiers, PSW was designed to create better cogs for the industrial machine, workers with not only modern technical skills but new logics and habits of mind and body compliant to the racialized logic of capitalist morality that constructed the worthy individual as a self-sufficient and self-managing subject.

Methods

Primary source materials for this historical discourse analysis include: The Proceedings of the National Conference of Charities and Correction; The Survey and its charity organization society precursors; Mental Hygiene and other contemporary journals. Archives examined include: The Mary Jarrett Papers (Smith College); E.E. Southard papers (Harvard University); The Eugenics Records Office records (American Philosophical Society).

Findings

Jarrett and Southard argued that using social workers trained in psychodynamic principles on psychiatric teams to address workers’ maladjustment problems created not only happy workers but benefitted industry and the social order itself, reducing labor turnovers, strikes, “the number of undesirable floating population,” and facilitate the Americanization of immigrants.

PSW’s diagnosis that issues as “dishonesty, laziness, intemperance, irregularity, shiftlessness and stupidity,” were “symptoms of mental defect and mental disorder” rather than “deficiencies of character,” still located the problem within individuals rather than systems. “Practical plans for meeting industrial unrest must be built up from the bottom, that is, upon the individual worker,” not by changing structures. Jarrett and Southard shaped not only today's clinical social work but also personnel management and organizational behavior fields.

Significance

PSW did not seek to expunge the oppressive logic of racial capitalism—itself fundamental to white nationalism—but toconstruct compliant pacified workers within it. Its call for "out-patient departments of state hospitals, for mental dispensaries... and for mental clinics connected with general hospitals" has been realized; most mental health services in the U.S. are provided by clinical social workers. Critical examination of the roots of PSW and its founding logics are necessary to better understand the shape and form of mental health services in the US and beyond it.