Jessie Taft
Two decades later Taft was to adopt a boy, Everett, the first-born son of Milo Hastings and Frances Horowitz.
In 1909 she got a fellowship and began working with George H. Mead (who became her thesis adviser), James Hayden Tufts, and William I. Thomas.
She then practiced psychology for four years before becoming director of the Child Study Department of the Children's Aid Society in Pennsylvania.
[2] Taft was finally able to begin an academic career in 1919 at the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Policy and Practice.
[4] In 1924, Taft met Otto Rank, an outcast disciple of Sigmund Freud, and became his American champion and translator.
She retired in 1950 to organize Rank's papers (he died in 1939) which were donated to Columbia University, and to write his biography which was published in 1958.
Taft's thesis topic was "The Woman Movement from the Point of View of Social Consciousness" accepted in 1913 by the Philosophy department at the University of Chicago.
The thesis is 25,000 words long probing the moving boundaries of private and public, subjects that galvanized new thinking about governing modern social problems therapeutically.
She invoked philosophers from Plato to Kant, surveying how religious, political and economic revolutions shaped consciousness of self and detailed the conflicts women face at home and at work.
The Introduction sets out the problem: Every nook and corner of feminine nature has been brought to light and examined as if woman were a newly discovered species.
It is fair to say that the majority of intelligent people today are agreed on at least two points: the necessity of improving motherhood and the need of some form of useful work for every woman.
The Conclusion is a summary and prophecy: The course of the preceding argument has been very briefly as follows: first, the woman movement is the expression of very genuine problems both for the individual woman and for society as a whole; second, those problems are the result of an unavoidable conflict of impulses and habits, values and standards…; third, such conflicts are, as a matter of fact, equally real for men and for women as the labor movement testifies, and give evidence of a real dualism of self and social environment…; and finally, the restoration of equality between self and environment depends on the possibility of developing a higher type of self-consciousness whose perfect comprehension of its relations to other selves would make possible a controlled adjustment of those relations from the point of view of all concerned.
----- All of this hopeless conflict among impulses which the woman feels she has legitimate right, even a moral obligation, to express, all of the rebellion against stupid, meaningless sacrifice of powers that ought to be used by society, constitutes the force, conscious or unconscious, which motivates the woman movement and will continue to vitalize it until some adjustment is made.
In 1918 she left the Committee because of World War I and left New York for Philadelphia (where Robinson was on staff at the Pennsylvania School of Social Work) to join the Seybert Institution as director of a new Department or Child Study, organizing a school for problem children and doing much case work.
Finally in 1919 Taft was able to enter the academic world as a full-time faculty member of the School of Social Policy and Practice.
Robinson in her professional biography of Taft writes that "The discovery of the use of function in helping processes, the most significant and influential concept in the development of theory and practice in the Pennsylvania School of Social Work, remains Dr. Taft's most significant and enduring contribution to theory and practice in social casework."
While the functional school was a minority, it had a strong influence on the larger social work field; it was also at times the subject of debate and controversy.
In 1924 Rank published The Trauma of Birth which emphasized the mother-child relationship and was viewed askance by the conservatives in the Committee, Freud's inner circle.
Taft's first contact with Rank came in June 1924 at a meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association in Atlantic City where he gave a paper on The Trauma of Birth.
Will for Rank, as defined by Taft, "… is the integrated personality as original creative force, that which acts, not merely reacts, upon the environment.
In 1936 Taft translated Rank's Will Therapy: An Analysis of the Therapeutic Process in Terms of Relationship and Truth and Reality: A Life History of the Human Will from German into English.
[11] The strong foundation laid by Jessie Taft and Virginia Robinson, meant that from about 1930 up until about 1985, the school continued to train social workers in a Rankian-inspired approach to working with clients.
