I suppose that when we can teach people to work and give them something they can practise all their lives and get joy out of, when we teach people to play, to deal rightly with their affections, and to worship, we have given realities permanently buoyant.
Our social history cards at the Red Cross Refugees' Dispensary in Paris had a great many blanks on them, which represented the blanks in our knowledge of the patients and the defects of our social work. We rarely entered deeply into our patients' lives in relation to their education, family life, recreation, religion. In our work at that Dispensary we dealt chiefly with medical facts and economic facts. To go thus far and no farther cannot satisfy many nor remake lives. That Dispensary was open but a few months and within that time, of course, nobody could expect us to enter into intimate relations with a human being's life. But if we were to work in any Dispensary for years and still not one of those cards had any note about the patient's education, recreation, family relationships, and religion, I should feel that we had failed. I should feel not only that we had done superficial work (that is often inevitable), but that we had done nothing but superficial work, which is not satisfactory.
It is because we want to give people the best, not that we have but that the world contains, that we should have spaces on our social history card for notes about those things which we believe are fundamental in our own lives and which we want therefore to see constructed or increased in somebody else.
Social treatment, then, is chiefly, the giving and building of health, pleasure, money, beauty, information, education, courage. It is not because we have such a tremendous stock of those goods to give away, but because we know that we must somehow help a person to self-help in those directions or else be superficial, that I have phrased social treatment in those terms.
4. Creative listening in social treatment
One of the simple and yet honestly useful things that we can do in social work is to give a man a hearing. Often he will solve his own problems with the aid of a little information from one whom he trusts and has talked things out with. But this implies unusual powers of listening on the social worker's part. It implies what Mr. R. H. Schauffler calls creative listening. Some of the most delightful friendships are those one makes through a magazine. In the "Atlantic Monthly" some years ago I saw an article on playing string quartets by a man whom I had never heard of, Mr. Robert H. Schauffler. Mr. Schauffler's writings, which I came to know through this article, contain many interesting points, but nothing so valuable to me as the essay on "The Creative Listener."[5] It was founded upon an autobiographical incident. As a musical amateur he used to attend orchestral concerts in what was then his home city, Chicago. He used to go with a certain group of friends, his brother and others, who liked to sit together because they found that in this way they enjoyed the music more. Ordinarily they were very regular in their attendance. But one evening for some reason they had to miss the concert, and then it came to their knowledge that the orchestra had felt their absence very much, and really could not play their best without them. This is true. There are people whose attention makes us play or speak or act better than we could otherwise. We have known it in friendship We all know that some people when we talk with them, make us feel as if we really were worth something, had some ideas. Others are destructive listeners who make us feel as if we had no ideas; our personality seems destroyed.
I think it is perfectly within the province of any of us to make himself more of a creative listener than he has been before. For creative listening is due in part to the intensity of our sympathy, the whole-heartedness with which for the time being we give ourselves to the person we are with.
Under favorable conditions the power of the creative listener to enlarge and to remake a personality is not capable of limit. The people whom I most often help are the people for whom I do nothing. They tell their tale, spread it all out before me; then they see the solution themselves. Just to state our difficulties clearly to another person who will listen not merely sympathetically but creatively, and with resistance as well as furtherance, is of value. With certain people we run against a stone wall every now and then, even though they are only listening silently. This is right and helpful. The right kind of listening is sympathetic when it ought to be and dissenting when it ought to be.
We help people out of trouble in other ways also; often by bringing new facts. A person tells us about his difficulties at work. He sees it perhaps more clearly after he has talked about it. But he may not know some facts that we know, and therefore we may be able to help in some ways that go beyond creative listening. But in the end a person has to make his own decision, to find his own solution; and in many cases he will find it without any more active or physical help than this.