THE ONE-EYED ODEN


Thesis for 5 points within the Education in Psychosocial Supervision and Consultation at the University of Gävle


ABSTRACT

The starting point in this thesis is the story about Oden in the Nordic mythology. For the purpose of gaining wisdom, Oden wants to drink from Mimer's well, which he is allowed to do - under one condition: he must leave one of his eyes as a pledge.

In a controversial study (Egelund 1999), Tine Egelund has described the Swedish educations of supervisors in psychosocial work as being too much based upon psychological theories, foremost psychodynamic theory, and too less based upon what she calls research based knowledge about social work. Her method has foremost been to classify the studied course literature, as well as the students' theses, in different categories regarding the theoretical direction and the level (intrapsychic, interpersonal, group- or societal level) for the interest of knowledge.

Tine Egelund's study rises a lot of questions. You can question the nowadays trendy notion research based knowledge, or even trendier evidence based knowledge, when it is applied on so complex processes as in social work. If you choose to restrict your definition of science to randomised and controlled studies in a positivistic paradigm, you perhaps sacrifice one of your eyes, alike Oden? The validity of Egelund's method can also be questionned, and thereby, it can be questionned if it is possible to draw the conclusions that she does. For example, the most important moment in the education of supervisors is perhaps not in the literature course, but in the moment of supervised supervision with one's own supervision groups, id est in the meeting with the actual reality of the supervised social workers.

This thesis tries, from a knowledge theoretical perspective, discuss these issues. A rather thorough literature resumé gives what I consider useful reference points for discussions of this topic. In the discussion chapter of the thesis, I try to reconstruct Tine Egelund's starting points, and make a critical examination of some of her conclusions.


©Gustaf Berglund

Download the whole thesis (in Swedish) (*.zip)