Jessie Taft: therapist and social work educator

"In this volume there evolves the strong, forthright, deeply compassionate, immediately and humanly responsive scholar, psychotherapist and social work educator who was Jessie Taft. Through her own writings and through the story of her life, which becomes their context, so comprehendingly and movingly told by Virginia Robinson, her lifelong friend and companion, she is here revealed as an always powerful, developing, and then fully developed professional self. The interaction of these two women, which served as spark to the genius of each, and which resulted in a contribution second to none in social work, is illustrated and exemplified in the production of this book. Dr. Taft lived positively, for and not against; for life richly and responsibly lived, for a belief in the wish and capacity of each to so live his own life, for defining and then using a psychology of help through human relationship, functionally determined and moving in time, as true for education for social work as for its practice. She was the living exponent of her own credo of the power of the positive will, a lover and liver of life. As she was so, she emerges so, in these pages, from her earliest beginnings to her own quietly affirmed ending with life, although the form and content of her professional contribution were influenced and confirmed by Dr. Otto Rank and her long friendship with Dr. Robinson. "The professional self is the immortal self," said Dr. Taft. Here is her immortality, and more. Here is the immortality of "Miss Robinson and Dr. Taft" as they were lovingly known"--Foreword. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved.