The Recuperation of Moral Agency through Structural Erasure in Clinical Social Workers’ Accounts of Career Path and Treatment Decisions

ABSTRACT Although the field of clinical social work has historically distinguished itself among the helping professions by its attentiveness to the ecological systems within which client struggles are embedded, the role of structural factors in shaping the professional activities of clinicians themselves often goes under-theorized. This paper argues that the erasure of structure and political economy from clinical social workers’ accounts of their own career trajectories and treatment decisions is not oversight. Rather, it occurs in response to social workers’ ambivalence or guilt regarding their aspirations to upward class mobility – feelings that arise, in part, out of a set of contradictory imperatives into which workers are socialized through their clinical training. By disavowing the impact of structural constraints on their own work, clinicians preserve a sense of professional integrity and moral agency under what are often compromised, frustrating, or heart-wrenching working conditions. However, this tactic of self-preservation may lead clinical social workers to inadvertently naturalize and reproduce some of the very structural inequalities that the profession is committed to redressing.