One favorite criticism of social work academics – and others who are hostile to
psychoanalytic thought – is that psychoanalysis is an elite form of treatment, an
inappropriate and largely irrelevant body of knowledge for social work. These critics
contend that psycho analysis was expressly designed for neurotic patients, the majority
of whom were women posses sing vast financial resources, able to commit literally to
years of therapy conducted at a frequency of 45 sessions weekly. For many, anything
psychoanalytic or psychotherapeutic is suspect, because it has the effect of derailing the
profession from its historical mission, that of aidig the poor and serving the
underprivileged . One of the more prominent critiques along these lines was advanced
by Specht and Mark (1997) in their book Unfaithful Angels: How Social Work Has
Abandoned Its Mission , though this argument has been made many times before and since