Klaipėdos universitetas

Caring professionals are one of the largest groups working in the field of human services. Important personal qualities in this area include strong communication skills, the ability to empathise with individuals’ experiences and manage one’s own emotions, a sense of responsibility, patience and helpfulness, and self-confidence. This article compares attitudes towards professional activity between two caring professions: social workers and pastoral care professionals. The results of the survey revealed that both groups have similar views on the specifics of their work, with more noticeable differences in attitudes related to spirituality. This aspect is significantly more important for pastoral care professionals than for social workers, although the ultimate goal of both professions remains the same: providing professional support to those in need.

The article is devoted to the anthropologically centred supervision of social field specialists. The concept of supervision is based on the patristic anthropology of the Church, which is fundamentally person-centred in any professional activity. This approach to supervision is very modern, as it resonates with the current professional paradigm shift from a profession-centred approach to a person/client-centred approach. The article presents quantitative research, with the aim of showing the expediency of person-centred supervision from the attitude of social workers. It analyses the main methodological principles of person-centred (the author uses the term ‘anthropologically centred’) supervision, and their application in supervision: 1) the concept of a person; 2) the term ‘personality development’ or personality transformation; 3) the factor of high-quality communication or reciprocity.

The article analyses the most relevant anthropological and transformative tasks of social work supervision in the context of today’s risk society, promoted by the process of globalisation with its instrumental rationality, which devalues the significance of the personality in the social system. The article provides the ontological grounds of the transformative function of supervision based on synergic patristic anthropology, and describes the simultaneous vectors of the transformative function in the supervision process: 1) experiential (experience-based) transformative learning, or acquisition of ‘practical wisdom’; and 2) anthropological transformation as a process of recreation of true self-identity. The article conceptually emphasises the decisive influence of the intrinsic quality of the supervisor’s personality in the performance of the transformative tasks of supervision, as well as the supervisor’s ability to form reciprocity relations with supervisees in the supervision process.