Humanistic Social Work

Book excerpt: "In this exciting new book, Malcolm Payne draws on core principles of social work to articulate a new humanistic practice for the twenty-first century. Humanistic Social Work: Core Principles in Practice presents a profession that aims at positive fulfillment in social relationships, exploring and reconciling artistic, creative, and spiritual avenues with evidence-based practice approaches and postmodernist understandings of human growth and knowledge development. Showing how practitioners can embody flexible, skilled, and knowledge-based responses to the complexities of human individuality, Payne reorients the aims of social work as an accountability to clients' individual self-fulfillment, enabled by community and social development. Humanistic Social Work is a reaffirming treatise on the strengths rather than the deficits of the individual, the innovations rather than the imperfections of the social work profession."--Publisher's website.