Social Work Now, Issue 39, pages 38-48.
This article will consider one approach to ‘thinking about thinking’ as developed in Sharon Berlin’s early but seminal paper on dichotomous and complex thinking. While Berlin would proceed to develop her ideas and clinical strategies even more fully in her later work with Jeanne Marsh (Berlin & Marsh, 1993) and then in her major book on clinical theory (Berlin, 2002), the 1990 paper raised provocative problems that merit close reading and discussion. The article concludes with some extensions of Berlin’s analysis and their relevance for contemporary social work.