Who is the "self" in self-aware: Professional self-awareness from a critical theory perspective

Abstract

Professional self-awareness is widely considered a necessary condition for competent social work practice. Alternate prescriptions for self-awareness rely implicitly on varying definitions of what it means to be a "self" and what it means to be "aware." I will review three approaches to professional self-awareness conventionally adopted in the literature: (a) simple conscious awareness (awareness of whatever is being experienced), (b) reflective awareness (awareness of a self who is experiencing something), and (c) reflexive awareness (the self's awareness of how his or her awareness is constituted in direct experience). Strengths and limitations of these three epistemological approaches are discussed. An alternate framework, based on Anthony Giddens's "structuration theory," is developed and advanced as a more macro-level and less exclusively psychological understanding of practitioner self-awareness. The article concludes with illustrations from practice.