Abstract EN:

In the dawn of the 21st century, social workers confronted by formidable challenges (social changes, political indecisions, upheavals set into motion by factions, end of an imagined neutrality) perceived French society and their own work by means of a perpetual feeling of loss and falling down. Relying on an area survey that is at the same time qualitative and quantitative, on professional journals and on different sociological publications on social work, the thesis stipulates that the crisis so invoked by social workers themselves is more imagined than real. Downplaying the traps of conservatism, they base their professional credo on the principal of hope combining " a quest for a true democracy based on anti-capitalism and measured progressivism, as well as faith in the European construction ". Tragic and romantic heroes living as the " Good " who are subjected to a veritable " condemnation of Sisyphus ", colonized by university disciplines and dependent on administrative and medical frameworks that are collectively very little involved and yet tremendously morally indignant, they place their hope in the development of a " moral individualism " leaning towards " self-fulfillment of the individual ". They hope that in this way their client will escape social and psychological pressures and will influence their destiny. More tinkerers than technicians, more moralists that utopians, social workers live their own work-related activities by means of the prism of a bad conscience. That said, one must read the illusion of crisis not simply as an excuse, not uniquely as a complaint and even less as a guiding principal of social work, but more as a fundamental and existential element. A truly fortifying myth, the feeling of crisis permits social workers to distance themselves from the challenges that they encounter at the core of social mutations that are taking place and to exist in the core of multiple paradoxisms that are inherent in their own work.