Possibilities of using the humanistic ethics and psychoanalysis of Erich Fromm in establishing a relationship with a client within the context of anti-oppressive social work

Introduction

The social psychologist, philosopher, sociologist and associate of the Frankfurt School Erich Fromm (1900–1980) focused on the influence of capitalism on (mass) culture, mutual relations among individuals and the individual’s relationship to him/herself. Fromm’s (2000) critiques of Freudian psychoanalysis as reifying loyalty to the ruling establishment made him one of the first social psychologists to examine the mental side of an individual as a member of a particular social order as well as the effect of that order on mental health. Although Fromm is a well-known figure and his multifaceted work has over the years taken on international dimensions, he is not an author considered a classic source for theories regarding social work (Rasmussen and Salhani, 2008).

Particular attention has been devoted to Fromm’s attempt to bridge the dualism between psychoanalysis and Marxism, in other words to connect the possibility of the inner emancipation of the individual with a critical view of the wider society (Dowrick, 1983; Rasmussen and Salhani, 2008; St. Jean, 2016). Though seldom utilized in these terms in theory or practice, Fromm’s work may be inspiring for social work in several respects. As in the world of today so many regions are characterized by the hegemony of neoliberal ideology, which in its worst cases reduces all human society to market relations among individuals (Wacquant, 2009), Fromm’s critique of human alienation seems more relevant than ever. Based on some aspects of critical theory, Fromm’s work not only analyzes society, but also provides practical innovations, including steps on how to proceed in practice both at the level of the emancipation of the individual and wider societal change. This text focuses on the possibilities of using the humanistic aspects of Fromm’s work to address questions on how to change the individual’s self-perception within social structures as well as activate the individual’s potential to change aspects of the system. This theoretical article aims to propose the use of the theories of Fromm’s humanistic ethics and humanistic psychoanalysis in solving three selected intrasubjective and intersubjective issues that may be relevant for anti-oppressive social workers. Fromm’s ideas seem to be useful especially in answering questions related to boundaries in the relationship between the client and the anti-oppressive social worker as well as how to work with the ir/responsibility of clients. The first section of the article will present possibilities regarding the uses of Fromm’s work in resolving the risk of self-sacrifice to the client; the second will devote attention to working with the border between social worker and client; and the third will propose a concept with regard to working with client ir/responsibility.

Although in international documents (International Federation of Social Workers [IFSW], 2014, 2018) social work is generally framed in terms of opposition to oppression, this does not automatically mean that the practice of all social workers is conducive to the best results in this regard (Howard and Agllias, 2016; Liebenberg et al., 2015; Solvang and Juritzen, 2020). This text uses the term ‘anti-oppressive practice’ as a designation for ways of working that are characterized by an engaged and activist approach seeking to address unfair and unjust social conditions. Remaining conscious of the binary simplification of oppressive/anti-oppressive and of the diverse plurality of ways of working, the synonymous term mainstream will be used in this text as contradictory designation to anti-oppressive social work. The latter term is meant to be understood in a Weberian sense as an ideal type (= abstract model of certain phenomenon that embodies its most typical characteristics) of social work focused on the adaptation of the client to unfair social conditions based on the principles of individualization and responsibilization of clients. While primarily focused on the practice of anti-oppressive social workers, the article highlights the possibilities of different experiences of selected intrasubjective and intersubjective issues among mainstream social workers. The examples of practice presented in the text come from the Czech Republic, which is, as a post-communist country, characterized by a very strong economic neoliberalization of society and emphasis on cultural values that individualize social problems and responsibility for their solution.

How to prevent self-sacrifice to the client? Self-love

Studies in anti-oppressive social work have not devoted a great deal of attention to the topic of setting and the social worker maintaining her or his own boundaries. In terms of the relationship with the client, studies generally focus on self-reflection in terms of the social worker’s own oppressive role (Dalrymple and Burke, 2006; Dominelli, 2008; Profitt, 2011) rather than on the question of how practitioners can protect themselves from breaching boundaries. It is as if it were automatically assumed that social workers will face more of a rigid boundary, where they are not able to establish a relationship with the client, than a permeable boundary, where the relationship with the client begins to disrupt the autonomy of the social worker (Kopřiva, 1997). This kind of boundary breaching remains one of the common causes of burnout syndrome for the social worker.

There is no consensus in the literature as to whether critically oriented social workers are more or less at risk of burnout than are traditionally oriented workers. What speaks in favour of a lower risk of critical social workers suffering a burnout is that they reflect more on the structural causes of failure in dealing with client situations and thus doubt less their own competence (Mullaly, 2007) and are equipped with a more diverse range of (radical) tools to deal with burnout (Fook, 1993: 95). Conversely, however, it can be argued that practical approaches built on anti-oppressive principles increase the risk of burnout due to increased frustration with diminishing resources to address client needs (Johnson et al., 2018; Mullaly, 2007) and due to marginalized self-position within the employer organization and among colleagues who may perceive critical approaches as boundless, naïve, or unrealistic (Beresford, 2011; Mullaly, 2007).

What is not addressed much in the literature is the assumption that boundary breaking and burnout may also occur because of a greater commitment characterized by a deeper relationship and alliance with the client. This risk certainly cannot be downplayed, thus both theorists and practitioners of anti-oppressive approaches should develop consistent strategies of working towards establishing and maintaining healthy boundaries. The globally applicable model was devised by O’Leary et al. (2013), who do not perceive borders traditionally in the sense of separating social workers from their clients, but as a space surrounding and connecting workers and clients. In this space, the setting of mutual boundaries must always be negotiated individually with the client. There are, of course, areas where the relationship cannot be negotiated, such as lending money, discrimination or having a sexual relationship with a client. But such negotiations can be beneficial in many areas of the relationship, such as confidentiality, cultural differences or the use of humour. Because boundaries are largely determined by unconscious processes, self-reflection on the part of the social worker is a prerequisite for such negotiations. Fromm’s concept of self-love can form a useful outline for such self-reflection and consequent work with oneself.

Fromm (1967) sees the risk of breaching boundaries primarily in the so-called symbiotic relationship with the client, an association which is characterized by such intimacy with the other that there is a loss of freedom and integrity of all actors involved. At the extreme, symbiosis can have either a masochistic character, when the practitioner is inclined to self-sacrifice for the client, or a sadistic character, when the social worker feels the need to overly control the client and thus the wider situation. These extremes of unhealthy relationships can be risky for critically oriented workers.

According to Fromm (1967), unhealthy relationships may have their origin in the worker’s feeling of loss of control over her or his own life. People may increasingly control nature, but the institutional system they have created to colonize it has enslaved them. It has deprived them of freedom, of their own authentic values, of faith in themselves and the meaning of life. The person has ceased to act as an individual and becomes what she or he wants and expects the system to be a mere tool of the institution. In the case of a masochistic symbiotic relationship, this loss is resolved by focusing on the other – the client. When the worker no longer is able to act spontaneously upon her or his own values, the worker can also seek to reconcile this inconsistency by sacrificing to the client. In another words, the worker seeks to replace herself or himself by the client.

Fromm (1966) also describes how the loss of self-confidence leads to the risk that a relationship with others comes to overshadow the relationship with oneself. If this feeling carries over to social work, it should remain the case that the basic interpersonal relationship of the worker with the client does not outweigh the relationship that the social worker has with herself or himself. This is what Fromm describes as self-love, a feeling which balances the individual’s own interests with those of others. According to Fromm, people have lost this ability and must learn it again. Self-love focuses on one’s own happiness, needs and the obligations towards oneself as well as the happiness and needs of others as well as obligations towards them. Self-love is not the same as selfishness, as according to Fromm the selfish individual also has no relation to herself or himself. In this he distances his concepts from those of Freud, who equates self-love and selfishness. In Fromm’s conception, selfishness is rather the opposite of self-love, because it arises from a lack of it. While from the point of view of mainstream social work, the fundamental question is how to distinguish positive self-love from negative selfishness, for anti-oppressive social workers it seems a crucial issue to distinguish between self-sacrifice for others and positive self-love.

Self-love is built on faith in oneself and in one’s own nature. It follows that this will take a different form for each person based on individual characteristics. No universal form of self-love can be determined. Only the paths through which self-love can be achieved – self-awareness and self-liberation – are universal. Achieving these goals should result in an active approach to life and an effort to change the world for the better (Fromm, 1966). The steps on such a path are shown in sFigure 1, where its content is described in the table.

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Figure 1.

Steps towards self-love in Erich Fromm’s approach.

Self-knowledge for Fromm (1966) means engaging in a process of critical thinking through which it is possible to reflect on one’s own nature and the social conditionality of one’s own life. A major part of this process is understanding what makes one happy. In his view, naturality is increasingly being replaced by submission to authority, so that people cease to live their own lives and instead live a life imposed on them from outside by institutions. A few examples useful for understanding self-reflective questions for social workers are presented in Figure 1. Primarily, the need for self-reflection of one’s own motivation for engaged ways of working seems to be a key necessity for anti-oppression social workers. This is because it can reveal the hidden motives to help resulting from the masochistic character and the loss of oneself. If self-reflection shows that the motivation for engaged social work is the absence of meaning of life and faith in oneself, it is necessary to return from engagement to work with oneself and to cultivate one’s character in a purposeful way.

Self-reflection upon the contextual conditionality of one’s own life entails being aware of the origin of one’s own values. These can be influenced by systems of global, cultural, social, economic and political institutions. Fromm (1994) focuses on this process in The Art of Being, in which he explains the importance of self-reflection as a path to self-knowledge in broader social contexts (see also Bierhoff, 1993; Wilde, 2004). As a social psychologist working with the wider contexts of individual human situations, he can be surprisingly inspiring for anti-oppressive social workers. Specifically, through his method of transtherapeutic psychoanalysis, he demonstrates the enmeshment of psychological needs with socio-economic conditions (Durkin, 2014: 103). In The Sane Society, he writes about the human situation as a set of conditions that form the mental side of the individual (Fromm, 2008: 26). In his book Escape from Freedom (Fromm, 1993), he emphasizes how a man and his nature cannot be understood without understanding the cultural contexts that shape them. Examples of questions through which social workers can reflect on their own contextual conditionality are given in Figure 1.

In connection with understanding and the building up of self-love, self-reflection upon one’s own social conditionality should focus primarily on revealing how the very nature of social work can be de/formed by the systems of cultural, social, economic and political institutions. In the case of mainstream social workers, many of these institutions, operating on the ideology of neoliberalism or according to Eurocentric theories, may support practices based on radical individualism or the ideology of meritocracy. Promoting and prioritizing the ‘free individual’ can then be reflected (in any social system) in a lower commitment among actors to help those who are seen to have failed in some way, or even in blaming them for problems that have arisen structurally.

Conversely, in the case of critical social workers, the actions of the same neoliberal institutions, which are, however, reflected only critically, can lead to the opposite personal setting – to over-involvement. The danger in this case is that the motive for social work is not the natural need to help others, including respect for these individuals, but the worker’s own need to sacrifice. For example, thinking in which the client is reduced to an unfree subject and merely an enfeebled victim of external social circumstances can be considered an indicator of over-engagement. Although social structures may limit the freedom of human choice depending on the social position of clients, they do not necessarily determine outcomes of all clients in an equally fundamental way (Young, 2011). In the case of a masochistic–symbiotic focus, the resignation of social workers to control or direct approaches in situations in which such a way of work is appropriate and desirable due to the threat to the client or other persons may appear to be an increased risk.

According to Fromm (1966), the second step towards self-love is self-liberation, which he understands as gaining faith in oneself. Only when one gets to know oneself in one’s authenticity and identifies with that authenticity does one become free. Then individuals are able to sensitively balance between their own happiness and the happiness of others, to understand and accept duties to themselves and to others, and to take care of both themselves and others. Self-liberation can only be achieved by overcoming one’s selfishness (Fromm, 1994: 105) by learning to satisfy one’s natural needs in accordance with the natural needs of others. When one manages to cultivate one’s own character in this way, Fromm (1967) describes this process as productively oriented. A person with a productive orientation does not instrumentalize others to achieve their goals; love for others simply becomes a goal itself. It follows that an anti-oppressive social worker becomes free only when he includes his own authentic needs in the negotiation of the relationship with the client, such as the need for rest, separation of personal and professional life, or respect for their values, gender, race, or sexual identity.

Self-liberation, however, is not the final end result of self-love for Fromm. Actions must follow. For human life to make sense, it must be characterized not only by an understanding, but also by an effort to change it for the better (Fromm, 1994). In this, Fromm remains true to the features of critical theory, which must be not only explanatory, but also practical and normative (Bohman, 2005). Fromm focused on the possibilities of praxis to better the world, especially in The Sane Society (2008) and through a Marxist interpretation of human nature in Marx’s Concept of Man (2004). In these works’ efforts to change the world for the better, they are particularly committed to Marx’s legacy of freeing man from pressure of economic needs, emancipating them from alienation and restoring their relationship to nature and thus to themselves.

How to set up a relationship with the client so that neither’s boundaries are violated? Fraternal love and humanistic ethics

As explained previously in this text, the violation of the boundaries of social workers may be caused by the alienation of the person from herself or himself. According to Fromm (1967), even the symbiotic–sadistic character is based on the loss of the meaning of life. In this case, the loss is compensated for by controlling the other, who becomes merely an object of the controller’s need and who in turn completes the feedback loop by (consenting to or being deceived into) being owned. According to Fromm, the modern human is increasingly focused on owning in order to have something to control (including other people) rather than concentrating on his or her own life and maintaining healthy reciprocal relationships. Fromm (1992) later elaborated on this idea in detail in the book To Have or to Be?

In social work, a sadistic relationship can be motivated by achieving and maintaining the power over the client. This relationship is a priori asymmetric, if only because of the mandated social and legal authority assumed from the training, knowledge, experience and tools available to the social worker (Kopřiva, 1997). The social worker may be perceived as a ‘magical helper’, a figure who in earlier or other cultures was/is considered a shaman, priest, politician or teacher. Clients accept this authority based on the premise that the practitioner wants only the best for them (Fromm, 1967: 12). Cooperation with experts may bring clients any number of benefits, but at the same time the danger of boundaries being breached. On the one hand, clients can obtain resources and support through the provision of expert assistance, while on the other this can cost them their independence. Adams (2003) draws particular attention to the risk of merely formal client participation instead of real power sharing between the actors in the system. This may stem from the dilemma between empowering clients to take power over their own lives and the commitment to support and protect clients, which can lead to the fear of the social worker to hand over responsibility to clients for their own situation. Such a dilemma often arouses anxiety in many social workers. And this reluctance to relinquish power to the client can be a manifestation of a sadistic–symbiotic relationship if it is motivated more by the worker’s own need to control the situation than by the real needs of the client.

Fromm focuses on the topic of the relationship with the client in the books Man for Himself: An Inquiry Into the Psychology of Ethics (1967), The Sane Society (2008), The Art of Loving (1966), The Art of Being (1994) and The Art of Listening (2000). These works consider love to be a productive form of relationship with others. Through it, they define borders as an intimate relationship ‘between two people, provided that the personality of both remains intact’ (Fromm, 1967: 90). The relationship of love is characterized by responsibility, care, respect, understanding and a desire for the other person to develop. This connection is the opposite of a regressive relationship (sadism and masochism), as it is built on respect for others and respect for oneself. In The Art of Loving, Fromm defines several other types within the more general concept of love, of which ‘brotherly love’ appears to be useful for social work. The benefits can be explained through four main features: the support of the client’s individuality, respect for the client, an equal relationship and mutual help.

The support of the client’s unique individuality is analogous to the need for self-knowledge and self-liberation in the social worker herself or himself. Just as a social worker should understand her or his own needs and should begin to take them into account in their relationships with others, so should the practitioner help the client to achieve the same knowledge and liberation. Fromm (1966) notes that society as an anonymous authority influences the individual’s need for recognition of a distinct identity, often to the extent that it can force the person to abandon his or her personality in favour of submitting to the authority of public opinion supporting majority conformity. In line with Fromm’s concept of brotherly love, social workers should support clients in recognizing their own nature and the determining pressure that alienates them from themselves. In this, they approach the concept of false consciousness as defined by Paolo Freire (2005), according to which objects of oppression perceive themselves through the prism of dominant groups. Critical social workers should be aware of this social enforcement of conformity. In accordance with Fromm’s conception of brotherly love, they should build and support the client’s individuality, confidence in their own abilities, and seek ways of defiance against oppression. Brotherly love is also characterized by respect for the other and an effort to perceive who the person really is (Fromm, 1966: 40). According to Fromm, such an understanding may be hindered by workers’ focus on the first impression, which usually conveys the differences of the other rather than shared similarities. The need for control over clients can thus be amplified through this process of ‘othering’ based on emphasizing the opposition of the dyad ‘us’ and ‘them’ (Dominelli, 2008). Therefore, social workers should establish a feeling of mutual respect for/with clients by seeking out similarities and building upon the natural affinities that exist between people. Similarities may not lie only in external traits, such as gender, age or race, but also in similar experience or close opinions.

Brotherly love is characterized by mutual equality (Fromm, 1966: 41), the fulfilment of which Fromm developed within the framework of his humanistic ethics. In the book Man and Psychoanalysis (Fromm, 1967: 12–13), he distinguishes this approach from authoritative ethics. Authoritative ethics denies the individual the ability to distinguish good from evil, but it does so for encouraging interests of those who have power in their hands. Through authoritative ethics, the client may be encouraged to internalize dominant values that may not work in the client’s legitimate interest. Compared to that, humanistic ethics calls for discussion and it stands on applying the rational authority, which is characterized by the possibility and even necessity of criticism of the system by those who are subjected to its authority. In systems or relationships that respect rational authority, there is no need to intimidate, idolize or exploit any of the actors involved. The empowerment of the subject that comes with the acknowledgement of rational authority thus becomes an important inspiration for anti-oppressive social workers, who can seek out dialogue with clients, not only eliciting their opinions, attitudes and potential solutions, but also client feedback on the course of the work. Through this give and take approach practitioners can then more carefully monitor and control their own tendencies with regard to (potentially) paternalistic or over-regulatory ways of working with clients. Brotherly love must also be characterized by mutual aid (Fromm, 1966: 41). In helping the other, all the previously discussed signs of brotherly love must be respected.

How to work with the responsibility of clients within the relationship

On the one hand, anti-oppressive social workers with their own feelings of dissatisfaction may themselves come to reflect the unfair conditions, discrimination and oppression of clients embedded in neoliberal social systems. On the other hand, practitioners may face client irresponsibility when clients do not attend appointments, do not perform scheduled tasks, manage situations poorly, do not search for employment, engage in poor childcare practices, do not deal with their substance abuse issues, smoke cigarettes in the company of children or nonsmokers and so on. Client responsibility is a key issue in social work, as it can determine both the assessment of the causes of the client’s unfavourable situation as well as the choice of subsequent intervention. If clients are assessed as irresponsible, this can often mean for them that the help of social work is reduced to creating or exacerbating individual client responsibilization and/or to excessive sanctioning by the system.

Responsibilization represents a state in which individuals are held solely responsible for their own functioning and for dealing with risks previously treated by the state (Harris and White, 2018). Relying on the excuse of client responsibilization as a substitute to addressing structural problems within the system is a typical strategy of social work anchored in neoliberal discourse. This attitude exaggerates the possibilities of the individual agency of people for their lives and downplays or even ignores altogether the influence of structural conditions on human choices. In this neoliberal discourse of victim blaming, people are dealt with as a failing business. Thus, the blame for any lack of success is attributed exclusively to the individual failure of a particular person.

In social work, an approach that identifies failure with guilt and irresponsibility leads in particular to the risks of completely depoliticizing social problems (Etherington and Jones, 2018; Howard and Agllias, 2016). This deviates comprehensive social work and moves it away from strategies that consider people in the context of their wider social environment, leading towards paternalistic work based on instructions on what clients should do without taking into account the real feasibility of the recommendations (Liebenberg et al., 2015). In this case, all actors must simply resign themselves to a lack of agency in the initiation of social change (Gojová and Glumbíková, 2015), which leads to a simplified binary classification of clients as deserving versus undeserving, or responsible versus irresponsible (Midgley, 2016; Solvang and Juritzen, 2020). Based on these fully disconnected subject positions of the worker and the recipient of aid, more repressive control techniques or direct sanctions can be seen as justifiably applied to the client – the other (Janebová, 2019; Levin and Liberman, 2019). Following all of these lines of inquiry, the topic of client responsibility should be given considerably more attention in social work theory and practice.

Fromm (1969) argues against the idea of radical individual responsibility in terms of the nature of evil in The Heart of Man (pp. 94–123). Although this book was written at a time before the events that preceded the rise of neoliberalism, Fromm offers an inspiring analytical framework for working with non-responsibility. He avoids the binary distinction between responsibility and irresponsibility. Fromm is not a radical determinist that would completely relieve people of responsibility for their lives, but he is also not a supporter of full or unequivocal responsibility. His perception of responsibility can be described as individual or situational.

Fromm (1969) always places the degree of responsibility of the person in the context of her or his own freedom. In order to be held responsible for a decision, one must have the freedom to decide. This freedom must be ensured both in the conditions of the social environment and the given situation, and it must be present at the level of a specific person. How Fromm distinguishes between a free and non-free decision is shown in Figure 2.

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Figure 2.

Conditions for free choice from the view of Erich Fromm.

According to Fromm (1969), in order to be held responsible for a decision, one must be in such situation and environment that offers a number of choices; these choices must be based in reality and must not be determined by previous negative events or decisions. If the situation is irresolvable or involves only one (generally bad) option, the decision to be made cannot be considered free.

Similarly, in social work it is necessary to consider whether the choices offered are not only hypothetical. It should be a crucial imperative for social workers to examine the feasibility of the options they offer to their clients. For example, when social workers put forth suggestions or options for single mothers to tackle poverty, they should also examine the degree to which – or even whether – the suggested strategy is feasible. Some choices may be limited by structural conditions that people do not control. In another example, it may turn out that finding and maintaining employment is a more realistic option for a middle-class woman due to higher wages she would presumably earn, but not for lower-class single women, who are often offered rather precarious forms of work. In addition to the fact that the income from menial work does not cover housing costs or other basic needs, these job offers usually cannot be accepted by single women due to time or location constraints. The decision of such a single woman in this situation not to take up such employment should not be interpreted as irresponsibility, but on the contrary as a rational and responsible decision based on the distinction between real and unrealistic choices.

Freedom of choice can also be restricted by previous events and bad decisions (Fromm, 1969). For instance, an experiment with heroin in adolescence which eventually led to addiction may lead to declining freedom of choice in future decisions. But is a teenage adolescent always aware of the ramifications of her or his decisions during this stage of life? And how could this decision have been influenced by a difficult family situation or peer pressure?

Fromm (1969) indicated a second condition for free choice as freedom at the level of the individual person. In order to be held responsible for a decision, one must be able to distinguish between good and evil, to be aware that one has a number of specific choices, and be competent to assess the consequences of different choices. Freedom of decision can be strongly or critically determined by unconscious forces acting on the personality of the individual who is choosing. This means that some people may not have freedom of choice due to innate or acquired personality dispositions. In social work, it is possible to imagine the general limitations imposed by psychiatric or mental disabilities of clients.

Fromm (1969) also describes how knowledge regarding different options can be influenced both genetically and socially. For instance, people with a mental disability may not have the competence to recognize that there are multiple ways to deal with their situation. This competence can also be influenced socially, for example, by lower education or ignorance. In legal matters, ‘ignorance of the law is no excuse’, whereas in the context of social work, responsibility is more of a moral category. Therefore, arguments regarding ignorance of all choices should be considered.

Free choice should be based on an awareness of the consequences of different choices (Fromm, 1969). However, in order to consider the possible ramifications of one’s own decisions, it is again necessary to possess the appropriate competencies. These can be limited by the client’s mental health or the particular situation in which he finds himself (a crisis situation), a decision must be made quickly.

In Fromm’s view, the question of the individual responsibility of people is much more complicated than has been presented in the following decades by some neoliberal ideologues (Charles Murray or Lawrence M. Mead). Fromm (1969) asserts that ‘responsibility is nothing more than an ethical postulate and often just a justification for the desire to punish of the authorities’ (p. 123). Because a social worker is one such ‘authority’ or functions in the place of authorities, the practitioner should be careful in working with the idea of the client’s individual responsibility for her or his life and in morally condemning those who the worker judges to have failed.

Fromm’s analytical framework for assessing non-liability may prove useful for social workers. On the one hand, from a descriptive point of view, it analyzes the components of responsibility relatively well, while on the other from a normative point of view, it can serve as a syllabus for assessing the client’s responsibility. Significantly, Fromm (2000) is not an absolute determinist who denies the individual’s freedom of choice. When the conditions for free decision-making are met, people should and must assume responsibility for their actions. In The Art of Listening (Fromm, 2000), Fromm goes even further and expands his ideas on responsibility using implications that correspond to the concept of empowerment, through which it is purported that people have the ability to transform the world through self-awareness and effort and, moreover, that they can and should do so. For social work, this means that clients should become the main ‘heroes of the drama’ (Fromm, 2000: 40). Although social workers should be careful in judging clients as irresponsible, they should facilitate their emancipation by empowering them to take responsibility for change at the individual and social level.

Conclusion

Theories of social work focused on anti-oppressive practice are mainly devoted to explaining the mechanisms of oppression and on determining ways to reduce oppression. Relationship issues between clients and social workers are addressed from the perspective of how to avoid oppression of the client by social workers rather than how to maintain one’s own integrity in engaged work. It is to mitigate the risk of breaching the social workers’ own boundaries that Fromm’s concept of self-love can be serviceable. Moreover, Fromm also offers inspiring answers to the highly relevant questions outlined above relating to the risk of clients being oppressed by social workers. Clear ways to handle exposure to risk in the course of moving social work practices away from the paternalistic approach can be found in Fromm’s brotherly love and humanist ethics. In terms of another relational aspect – the perception of client responsibility for a given situation – Fromm has developed concepts that bridge the one-sidedness of neoliberal discourse, which individualizes the blame for all social problems and reifies a structural view that perceives clients merely as fatal victims of social structures with no personal agency of their own. Although Fromm has been criticized for his efforts in this direction by psychologists for his excessive use of ‘sociology’, and by sociologists for his excessive ‘psychologization’ of human life (St. Jean, 2016: 258), applying his concepts to bridge this bifurcation between the individual and the social seems to be one of the greatest potential benefits in applying Fromm’s ideas to social work. In particular, his theories of brotherly love and reflections on the limits of free decision-making may be useful for social workers who take seriously both the Global Social Work Statement of Ethical Principles (IFSW, 2018) and the Commentary Notes for the Global Definition of Social Work (IFSW, 2014). Both concepts suggest how to practically develop critical consciousness related to one’s own as well as structural oppression. In this respect, a European variation on the Ubuntu philosophy, which is increasingly penetrating international social work, is actually offered. It is also based on the values of ‘justice, responsibility, equality, collectiveness, relatedness, reciprocity, love, respect, helpfulness, community, caring, dependability, sharing, trust, integrity, unselfishness and social change’ (Mayaka and Truell, 2021: 651).