The Aspect of Power in Social Work
INTRODUCTION
At first glance, it might seem unjustified to engage with the issue of power relations between social workers and clients and to use the concept of power in a field of human activity such as social work. After all, the very nature of this field rests on principles of equality and solidarity with clients in order to strengthen their full inclusion in society. Yet, just as in some other fields of human activity, many different factors come into play here, and these factors cause power relations to emerge.
The reason someone chooses the demanding and responsible profession of social work has various psychological causes, and each person has their own. Nevertheless, it is still possible to identify certain common reasons why one wants to work in social work and why one remains in this profession. It concerns first and foremost social workers with strong commitment and enthusiasm, even to the point of going to the limit, who want to do something for their clients and who repeatedly fall into the shadow of power. A detached social worker usually performs duties formally and is not deeply affected, positively or negatively, by the consequences of their own activity. In the case of passionate and dedicated social workers, we are dealing with people of a very specific psychological structure who have made it their life task to expose themselves to the most diverse polarities.
We consider the issue of power to be one of the most important aspects of work with clients, and a significant determinant in shaping the process of cooperation between social worker and client. It is essential that social workers themselves can reflect on this issue and reflect on it at a basic level. A precondition for successful work with a specific client is awareness of this dimension in the relationship between a social worker and that client.
The use of power differs across helping professions. The view of its application, according to Schmidbauer (2008), changes over time, but it still remains true that to some professions it applies more and to others less. Wilding’s (1982, p. 53) statement that “many professionals have direct and immediate power over people” leads us to conclude that its study in relation to social work is therefore significant.
The psychological background of the actions of all people who work to help others is highly ambivalent. Officially and consciously, their main motivation is willingness to help, while at the same time in the deep recesses of their psyche the opposite awakens—a desire to rule and an impulse toward power. Abuse of power, hidden behind arguments of objectively proper and morally correct action, has more than once led in history to brutal stories. Apparently objective and correct decisions, justified by sound arguments, create in the helping professional a kind of armor that can hardly be pierced by remorse or bad feelings.
In our reflection we start from the assumption that power is a very substantial dimension of the relationship between social worker and client. From the worker’s impact on the client, those most significant in social work may include the powers granted to the social worker by law and his position in a specific institution, the influence of social work expertise on the client, and the influence of the workplace’s institutional context.
At the outset, it is useful to examine where social workers’ power actually comes from. Kopřiva (1997) distinguishes two basic sources of power—power grounded in the worker’s authority and power institutionally assigned. Power grounded in the worker’s authority is based on the fact that the client needs something with which the worker can help them. The worker has certain information, knowledge and experience. The worker decides whether and to what extent to use these abilities for the client’s benefit and what room to grant the client in the relationship and in decision-making. The social worker’s quality of work and level of engagement determines the client’s future. Institutionally assigned power translates the social mandate of social work into a situation in which the social worker oversees clients’ ability to comply with binding norms and values. By virtue of legal ordinances, social workers are authorized to intervene in clients’ lives.
Hejna (2000), discussing the source of institutional power in social workers, notes that there are some “objective facts” that make the social worker “more powerful” than the client. This includes that the social worker is usually a representative of the state, a spokesperson of the majority, and a representative of majority culture. The social worker is the one who represents the criteria of normality and decides on the citizen rights of clients. In this case, institutional power of the social worker is perceived more negatively. Úlehla (1999) hypothesizes that this is also due to the fact that the helper, as representative of society and mediator between clients’ needs and social needs, stands on the side of the stronger one—on the side of law and the state. This does indeed bind him to compliance with norms, but on the other hand makes contact with clients more difficult. Even if it may not seem so at first glance, the social worker is a very powerful person precisely with respect to a specific individual because they represent the majority in relation to a minority.
Power does not negatively affect only the client; it also affects the social worker negatively. This undesirable influence is mostly not even recognized. A situation where the helper is positioned as an expert relative to the client can easily lead to a sense of infallibility. This feeling is highly misleading and can be very dangerous within the professional social worker–client relationship. The helper may then apply simplifying schemas and judgments that do not fully capture the client’s real situation, which leads to incorrect direction on the path to effective help.
A social worker must first become aware of their own power over the client and be aware that their judgment and decision affect not only good intentions but also motives that reflect the worker’s “dark” side. In this context, Guggenbühl-Craig (2007, p. 14) warns that no one can act solely on pure motives, noting that “even the noblest actions spring from pure and impure, light and dark motives.” At the same time, he reminds us that “even a social worker strongly controlled by a taste for power can make decisions that are useful for the client.”
Awareness of this duality is the first step for the helper toward a sincere, genuine approach to the client and their problems. Otherwise, it is easy for the helper to drift into undesirable manipulation of the client, which may become visible wherever human freedom is not respected.
The mechanism of manipulation first requires setting goals toward which the social worker wants to bring the client. Trojan (1993) states that these are exclusively the projection of the actor’s will in manipulation; the “victim” has no direct share in determining them. The manipulator expects the manipulated person to grant permission. The position of both sides is not balanced, because power is on the helper’s side. In dealing with the client, the helper can use the authority connected to their function to advance their intentions. The client can easily slip into a subordinate role because they lack sufficient information and the authority with which the helper governs. Thus a power dimension enters into the concrete problem field, creating space for manipulation.
When we think more carefully about this issue, however, we realize that manipulation cannot be understood only as an exclusively negative phenomenon. It is necessary to realize that the helper’s power is supported by a certain general social consent, which gives it legitimacy. In some situations, the helper’s power over the client is even desirable. Guggenbühl-Craig (2007, p. 9) confirms this when noting that “in social work one must often act against the client’s will, because the client is not always capable of recognizing what is good for them by themselves. Under certain circumstances, the law gives the social worker the possibility of imposing measures that seem correct to them even against the client’s will.”
These situations are, however, very difficult to assess and require substantial expertise, problem knowledge, and especially empathy. The social worker must repeatedly ask themselves whether the measures proposed are truly in the client’s interest. They must not be influenced, even unconsciously, by their own interests or egoistic motives.
Uncovering such motives is not easy. A social worker can feign, sometimes quite genuinely, that they are not seeking to manipulate the client. According to Trojan (1993), this concealment is made possible by human freedom and the spiritual dimension of existence, the person’s ability to explain anything in countless alternatives and variations. The person has the ability to create self-images and images of their own actions and then present them as reality, thereby obscuring the actual state of affairs.
Regarding when action against the client’s will is justified, Guggenbühl-Craig (2007, p. 10) answers: “Action against the client’s will requires conviction. A person must be convinced that what they want is right.” But we must realize that dilemmas are always complex. The basic question a social worker must ask when facing a dilemma remains whether they have the right to intervene in the client’s freedom. Under all circumstances, they must always consider the fact that the client remains the one solving their own problems.
POWER RESOURCES OF THE SOCIAL WORKER
Given the idea that power is inseparable in the helping relationship between social worker and client, it is clear that power in such a relationship is two-way. If our goal is to understand social workers’ power within their relationship with clients, we must also pay attention to power resources and the institutionalization of power in social work.
For social work to be effective and produce results, it must, according to Epstein (1999, p. 8), “influence people, motivate them to adopt normative views consistent with the social workers’ own intentions.” This means that to achieve their goals, the social worker must be dominant in relation to the client. This is so even though interpersonal theories of client relationships demand democratic and equal stances. At the same time, the social worker must act without the use of force and indirectly in order to preserve clients’ voluntariness. There is obvious ambivalence and ambiguity in the goals. Musil (2004) also addresses the same issue, arguing that the goals of social work are ambiguous for various reasons, creating dilemmas for social workers and discrediting social work organizations.
NORMALIZATION, DISCIPLINE, SURVEILLANCE
According to some authors, especially postmodernists and proponents of Foucault’s theory, one of the goals of social work is normalization of the client. Normalization in Epstein’s (1999) sense means making someone submit to or accept a norm or standard; making normal by transforming aspects of the person or situation. Normalization is a process that, by dividing into normal and non-normal, standard and non-standard, permissible and impermissible, carries clear signs of power. Foucault (2000) speaks of the power of the norm by which modern society supplemented and bounded the power of law, language and text, and tradition. Normalization and, with it, surveillance become one of the major instruments of power. Foucault is convinced that normalizing power is still strongly present today in all spheres of social life.
Foucault (2003), however, suggests that power relations are not by themselves bad and, in claiming that power is positive, overturns another prejudice in how power is understood. He does not say that power is not repressive at all or that the repressive side of power in modern society has disappeared forever. Through his claim about the positivity of power, Foucault wanted to point first to an overly simplified and one-sided view of all those who approach power only negatively, and second to draw attention to its creative potential. For power to be sufficiently effective, especially under modern conditions, if it is to influence individual behavior directly and change it, it cannot rely only on prohibitions, restrictions, or suppression. Modern power must primarily produce—it must direct, organize, rationalize people, stimulate and regulate their activities, produce and shape their knowledge, truths, desires, and expand and intensify their forces and capacities.
According to Kappl (In: Janebová, Kappl, Smutek, 2008), social work participates directly in maintaining social functioning. In line with postmodern “normalization,” its task is to normalize those clients whose life paths deviate from the average, where this average is pre-defined. The goal is to bring the client through the process of normalization, performed through disciplinary strategy, to conformity with the norm. Chambonová (1999, p. 66) supports this, emphasizing that discipline “does not only limit or eliminate undesirable behavior, but also shapes desired behavior” toward the ideal norm.
In this we can see Foucault’s idea of power’s positive or productive character. The normalizing space of modern society was built as a space for correcting individual behavior and shaping people according to the same pattern. On the other hand, we must remember that these same assumptions from which disciplining emerged also allowed processes of individualization to develop. Foucault sets in opposition sovereign legality grounded in individual rights and rigorous control carried out by coercive disciplines, which in practice ensures social coherence. Precisely between sovereignty-based legality and disciplinary techniques, power is exercised. This disciplining in fact reproduces its own discourses.
Foucault (2005, p. 49) speaks here of the so-called discourse of discipline, which has nothing to do with legal discourse. “Disciplinary procedures are indeed bearers of a discourse of rules, but not legal, derived from sovereignty; instead, a natural rule, namely normativity. They define a code that is not a code of law but a code of normalization, and will necessarily refer to some theoretical horizon that is not legal justification but a field of sciences about the human being.” Van der Laan (1998, p. 36) presents Karskens’s definition, which sees discipline as “a mode of control that combines modern legal regulation of the state, patterns of conduct from social work and medicine, the work of many educators and the police.”
According to proponents of Foucault, applying social-work-related knowledge in social work leads to various forms of hierarchical surveillance. Foucault himself often speaks here of the so-called “all-seeing gaze” of various professional groups, most often those in medicine and social work. This “panoptic gaze” in interpersonal relations means that social control does not happen only from outside; it is also internalized.
Foucault (2001) sees discipline as a mechanism for regulating individual behavior characterized by organization of space, time, and human action. The intention of discipline is to provide the individual with skills and knowledge for developing self-control. People develop forms of self-censorship and self-control. Discipline is linked to a complex system of surveillance and social control throughout the whole life of an individual, which, besides other professions, is also carried out by social workers.
HELP AND CONTROL
Help and control are among the basic stances of the social worker toward the client. They belong to the repertoire of ways a social worker works and have a stable place in it. This is confirmed by Úlehla (1999), who says that both are part of the social worker’s technical equipment, both are necessary and have their place, both are professional ways of working, and both occur during a conversation with a client.
This explanation suggests that both modes are important and that the social worker can combine them so that the resulting help is as effective as possible for the client. Their possibility of combination again leads to the assumption that help and control are distinct, not identical, concepts. Distinguishing help from control is essential because it is not possible to help and control at exactly the same time. At any given moment, the social worker either helps or controls.
According to Úlehla (1999, p. 20), control is “necessary, useful, and needed.” It differs from help in that it prioritizes others’ interests over the client’s interests, over whom the social worker cares, even though the social worker claims—and usually believes—that this is in the client’s interest and necessary, useful, and needed. Taking over control is characterized by the social worker following his or her own standards, mostly identical to the norms of the society represented. The goal is to change the undesirable into desirable, the forbidden into acceptable. The social worker applies power and decides on behalf of the client.
Contrary to control, Úlehla (1999, p. 21) defines help as a “negotiated form of joint work that the client wishes for, the worker offered, and the client chose.” We see that in helping, cooperation is involved: the social worker enters by offering help, negotiating the client’s task or order, and the client is competent in decision-making.
The distinction between help and control can be supported by Ludewig’s (1994) view that the existence of help fundamentally presupposes a search for help. If help is performed without being requested, one must rather speak of care, repair, control, or even takeover.
The decisive role in determining the nature of collaboration with a client, or at least any partial step of collaboration, lies with the social worker. Úlehla (1999, p. 23) expresses the view that the social worker is the one who “defines the essence of the next step by either taking control or offering help.” It is understandable that while client behavior is taken into account, the actual choice of whether to create opportunities for cooperation or to take over control rests with the social worker.
In this sense, it is important to specify how the social worker can determine or influence the nature of collaboration with the client. Quite practically, we can look at this question through the way the social worker communicates with the client—that is, through the type of intervention.
As stated above, the social worker has the mandate to help and the mandate to control. Ševčíková (In: Janebová, Kappl, Smutek, 2008, p. 129) also notes that social workers should “reflectively assess whether they are helping and preparing the client for collaboration, leading a dialog, or unilaterally intervening in the client’s life.” From this we infer that social workers should take it as self-evident to examine very carefully in which cases the client is capable of dialoguing and collaborating and in which cases it is necessary to assume responsibility and make decisions in the client’s best interest.
INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF POWER
At this point it is necessary to return to Foucault’s view on power and power relations. For him, the exercise of power can be understood as the way someone structures the field of possible actions of another person. A power relation is characterized by a mode of action acting upon other action, which means that power relations are deeply rooted in social contexts and in society they do not form merely an auxiliary structure.
One form of institutionalizing power relations is precisely social work, which realizes the exercise of power through various institutions delegating authority to social workers.
A social worker can achieve behavioral change in clients through authority influence. Yelaja (1971) supports this by viewing authority as the social worker’s power to affect client behavior, and this power should be acknowledged by the client. At the same time he addresses the concept of power in this context as the ability to cause a change in client behavior that aligns with the social worker’s aims. The authority of the social worker then lies in that if they want to influence and persuade the client, their effort is legitimate and therefore may be successful.
Musil (2004) states that social workers can apply two types of authority in power relations—assigned authority of their office and the worker’s natural authority. Natural authority of the social worker is based on personal qualities. It is the authority of a wise, experienced, educated, accommodating, empathetic, charismatic, consistent, or self-sacrificing person, which people seeking help spontaneously accept. However, the social worker must strive to establish his or her natural authority from first contact with the client. In doing so, symmetry enters into the power relation. Assigned authority lies in recognition of the influence that flows from the social worker’s position in the organization and from rights granted to the organization, and thereby the worker, by law or other assignment. If the client recognizes assigned authority, this is usually the result of unilateral dominance of the social worker, who through their position can give the client access to resources (e.g., provide counseling) or trigger punishment (e.g., initiate revival of criminal proceedings). The social worker therefore has an advantage, and the client seeks to prevent the social worker from using that advantage through one-sided decision-making to their detriment. Kopřiva (1997) also speaks of “institutionally assigned power,” understood as the social worker’s competence whose sources are laws, regulations, ordinances, expert information, as well as unwritten social norms and traditions.
Tufts (In: Yelaja, 1971) presents another distinction of authority that corresponds to the above types. To assigned authority he adds institutional, administrative, and professional authority, each drawn from different sources. Tufts also mentions psychological authority, which in his view is identical to natural authority. He sees psychological authority as an interpersonal relation in which the social worker applies influence over a client who does not fully accept reasons that assign value to activities, while both parties know this influence is being applied.
Bourdieu (1998) deals with so-called delegated authority. For him, the source of power is ownership of capital. Bourdieu does not view capital only as an economic category, but as a value of many types—social, economic, cultural, and symbolic. The most significant appears to be symbolic capital, because it is any type of capital recognized by society as important. In other words, symbolic capital means prestige, honor, and recognition in a particular area. It is therefore possible to infer that the symbolic power of social workers stems from their cultural capital, which includes their title gained through education, as well as their membership in a profession or specific institution. On this basis, the social worker has delegated authority deriving from these titles. Bourdieu regards a professional or academic title as a form of legal rule derived from social perceptions and guaranteed as a right. Thus symbolic capital appears in an institutionalized, legal, and no longer merely legitimate form.
LEGITIMACY OF SOCIAL WORKER POWER
The power we are discussing is applied within the relationship and oriented toward a specific goal. Social workers who apply power seek to achieve power goals in particular ways and use various means to do so. It is necessary that such behavior be justifiable before themselves and those around them, and therefore it must be legitimized. From Foucault’s theory of power, the rationalization used by social workers to legitimate their behavior derives from the individual’s discourse and habitus. We will therefore consider discourses that influence social work and social workers’ habitus.
First, however, it is useful to explain what we understand by habitus. A habitus can be understood as a disposition toward behavior or action, as a principle for classification, thinking, and seeing the world. Bourdieu (1998) says that if official representations of what a person officially is in a particular social space are turned into habituses, they become the real principle of behavior. According to the concept of habitus, each individual is socially determined, which is reflected in both their current and future actions.
RATIONALIZATION OF ACTION AND DECISION-MAKING
Rationalization is one of the legitimizing practices through which social workers seek acceptable explanations of situations and actions that are unpleasant in some way. Barker (2003, p. 360) understands rationalization as a “defensive mechanism by which a person explains or justifies their behavior or intentions so as to make them acceptable.” According to Musil (2004), social workers use rationalization to dampen the urgency of dilemmas that accompany managing their working conditions. This makes it clear that rationalization emerges from social work discourses and the social worker’s habitus.
One of the dilemmas Musil (2004) describes is the social worker’s decision between unilateralism and symmetry in relation to the client. In other words, this can also be put as the dilemma between control and authority on the one hand and help and support on the other. This dilemma corresponds to the topic of power. Musil identifies various ways of rationalizing a unilateral approach. A social worker may adopt a parental approach and perceive the client as a child, and act accordingly. The social worker can control the “childlike client,” supervise them, lead them, but also punish them and create dependency. Conversely, the social worker may try to be a “mature child,” who must be prudent with their “childlike parents.” In this way, the social worker rationalizes their position by styling themselves as a parent, or conversely as a mature child. Rationalization can be summarized as a parental analogy, a maternal approach, maternal leniency, or childlike parenting. Taken together, social workers use many rationalizations.
Rationalization concerns the effectiveness of power influence. Individuals legitimize their behavior with certain “rational” justifications. Power relations can be intensified depending on the effectiveness of tools and certainty of results, or in relation to possible costs, which can be assigned to means or to the expected response and resistance to power influence.
DISCOURSE OF DIFFERENTIATION
According to Foucault (2003, p. 220), “every power relation develops differentiations that are both its conditions and its effects.” Differentiations make it possible to act on others’ behavior and determine a position within the relation. Different methods of differentiation arise from social discourse, which determines ways of differentiating as well as the positioning of groups with certain distinctive characteristics.
Hall (2001) expresses the view that discourse concerns the production of knowledge through language. If all social practices bring meaning, and meaning forms and influences what we do, that is, our behavior, then all practices have a discursive aspect. In this sense, we can state that discourse includes various interpretations of the world, meanings, knowledge, and the rules for their ordering. The legitimacy of social work stems from the dominant discourse of this profession. That could include, for example, the organizational culture of a specific organization.
Hall (2001) further emphasizes that discourse is an instrument of power. It is selective because it includes selectivity of themes. Some utterances are recognized as dominant, while others are excluded. Discourse defines not only norms but also oppositions and abnormalities that should be sanctioned. And that is where its power lies. On this basis we conclude that discourses do not necessarily appear only at the whole-society level; they can also exist within an organization or profession. Certain statements, meanings, and knowledge in social work prevail and therefore form part of the dominant discourse, while others are excluded. In social work we can encounter diverse discourses. One of them is the discourse of norm, or normality.
DISCOURSE OF NORMALITY – ABNORMALITY
The discourse of normality is a key concept in Foucault’s theory. It is inseparably linked with the discourse of abnormality, which forms its opposite. Here we should simply recall that it was precisely Foucault who drew attention to the non-obviousness of normal and normality, and his mentor Canguilhem who noted that the shift from normality to abnormality, deviation, or pathology is not sharp and that pathology is a living reality.
We return once more to Foucault’s concept of disciplinary power, by which he describes the tools of its effectiveness. The first tool is hierarchical surveillance; one gaze that no one escapes. According to Foucault (2000, p. 44), disciplinary power “instead of uniformly and massively bending everything that submits to it, differentiates, analyzes, and distinguishes; it carries its processes of decomposition down to necessary and sufficient singularities.” It organizes as a power that is multiple, automatic, and anonymous. It is discreet in its “silence” and “restraint,” and indiscreet in its continuous interest in everyone at the same time. On this basis, demographic statistics are built. All these easily available and omnipresent statistics inform us whether each of us behaves as a standard for the majority or not. Expert views and forecasts based on them tell us what is likely to happen in the future, whether we will behave in one way or another. Also used for this are other tools of disciplinary power—normalizing sanctions and testing. All numbers gain meaning through various comparisons, hierarchies, and evaluations that impose normality. What is normal is what predominates; and what predominates we know thanks to statistics. Disciplinary power enables the construction of a comparative system that allows measurement of global phenomena, descriptions of groups, revealing individual deviations from others, and their placement within a population.
Social work uses expert knowledge through which it legitimizes its power goals. Social work theorists point out that social work has become part of disciplinary power as a discipline. Kappl (2008, p. 57) joins them and states that “social workers also appear as bearers of expert knowledge; they too divide the world into what is normal and non-normal, what is healthy and unhealthy, and their activities result in excluding certain people beyond the borders of normality.”
According to Guggenbühl-Craig (2007, p. 10), the notion of the normal individual stems from Enlightenment philosophy, which assumes “that a person can and should be rational and socially adapted.” Fulfillment of human life consists in the person developing according to the possibilities of the “normal.”
Clients’ problems and their demanding life situations fall within the discourse of abnormality. The discourse of normality is the dominant discourse that excludes abnormality. The social worker, as representative of majority culture, views clients’ problems through the lens of the dominant discourse. The client is understood as abnormal and therefore needs to be transformed toward the norm, that is, normalized. In different areas of social work, the norm may be understood differently and may stem from different knowledge and sources. Likewise, clients in different life situations are abnormal in different ways.
DISCOURSE OF HELP
A core pillar of the discourse of help is, according to Sýkorová and Chytil (2004), the use of the “principle of helping” rather than control or surveillance. Musil (2004) emphasizes that help is associated with care, support, dialogue, and a symmetric relationship between social worker and client. Their opposites are control, authority, monologue, and unilateral influence over the client by the social worker. Various social work theorists began to warn of a very real possibility that what social workers do is not so much about help as about control and disciplining clients. Van der Laan (1998) argues that a client in difficulty is compelled by the social worker to get into a state within the boundaries of norms. According to these theorists, help is no longer guided by the client’s wishes and needs, but by society’s ideas of what is normal and desirable. There is even concern that under modern social conditions, it is not factually possible to provide help without disciplining.
It is hard not to notice that social workers are sometimes associated with state disciplinary or even directly repressive power. Still, we can still recognize that occasional interventions that may appear controlling and supervisory are, more or less, necessary—for example, to protect the client’s interests. In this context, we could agree with views claiming that society has seen a massive increase in citizen control by state power, but on the other hand this growth in control is still acceptably balanced by a higher degree of safety and well-being that the modern state guarantees its citizens. Moreover, these evidently broad powers of social workers are subject to public oversight; there are laws that protect both citizens and social workers.
CONCLUSION
If we once again reflect on the phenomenon of power in the context of helping professions, we immediately find that the determining element of helping is the relationship—the relationship between the one who provides help and the one who receives it. At first glance, it is obvious that this relationship is not balanced. The helper appears as representative of the majority against the minority, and therefore it is natural that the client feels threatened in such a situation. Trust becomes a key element of this relationship and is indispensable for collaboration. A client who trusts the helper entrusts themselves in their own way. It is at that point that there is a risk the helper will misuse their power over the client. It does not necessarily have to be intentional misuse. Much more often, unconscious misuse can occur. A helper should realize that no one, despite altruism, is capable of acting solely on pure motives. Unconscious tendencies, egoistic motives, and even a hidden desire for power can infiltrate intentions.
In light of the preceding lines, it might seem that power is an unequivocally undesirable element in the helper–client relationship. That would be a major simplification. It is necessary to recognize that practice sometimes requires acting against the client’s will. These are cases in which the client is not themselves able to distinguish what is desirable for them. But if the helper must act against the client’s will, their action always requires conviction that they are doing the right thing. Such conviction, however, is highly subjective and contestable and can raise certain doubts in the helper. Doubting is normal. We therefore believe that if the helper doubts, things are in fact all right. Far more dangerous situations can arise when the helper has no doubts at all and is immovably convinced of their own truth. We must keep in mind that if we deem it necessary in the relationship with a client to promote our own value systems, awareness of the fragility of those systems should lead us to caution.
The helper thus faces the difficult task of correctly determining the degree of help so that they use an appropriate degree of paternalism when the situation requires it, while not suppressing the freedom of the autonomous individual. A precondition for approaching this ideal state is the requirement that the helper think ethically, identify and then take into account values that must be preserved, so that they can consider various possible consequences of their decisions and only then choose the form and degree of help they consider, according to their best judgment and conscience, to be correct.
Authors: PhDr. Bystrík Mitas The author is a doctoral student at the University of Health and Social Work sv. Alžbety in Bratislava Mgr. Lukáš Vasilenko
LIST OF REFERENCES
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