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Restructuring help: A human services paradigm for the 1990s

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American Journal of Community Psychology

Conclusion

The new paradigm calls for the restructuring, redistribution, and expansion of helping behavior by those who ordinarily function as consumers of help. Consumers are to become producers of prosumers. By so doing they expand the help-giving resources quantitatively by converting helpees into helpers. The help is also changed qualitatively because the peers and the self-helpers possess an indigenous or inside understanding of the problems and the people to whom they offer help. Heins Kohut, the brilliant psychoanalyst, suggests that the key to therapeutic change may not be insight or understanding, but rather being understood. Who better to understand than those who have been there?

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. City University of New York, 33 West 42nd Street, Room 620N, 10036, New York, New York

    Frank Riessman

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  1. Frank Riessman
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Invited address to Division 27 of the American Psychological Association, August 1989.

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Riessman, F. Restructuring help: A human services paradigm for the 1990s. Am J Commun Psychol 18, 221–230 (1990). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00931302

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00931302

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