Jessie Taft

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. It was published by the University of Chicago Press in 1916 with a note acknowledging her "indebtedness to Professor James H. Tufts and Professor George H. Mead for their advice and counsel".

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. Yet out of this endless controversy only a very general agreement has been reached. 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. But here the agreement ends. It is the purpose of this thesis to determine just what are the problems represented by the woman movement, to trace their connection with the larger, more inclusive social problems, and to indicate in a general way the direction from which a solution may be expected.

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.
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With women…social impulses are the only ones which are overtly recognized. Women are constantly forced into the economic world, but the system ignores that fact and provides in no way for combining the peculiar social function of women with any economic function which they may find desirable or necessary. Such economic expression as has been conceded to them is confined to the home. Likewise, the other impulses, even the maternal, have no recognized place outside the limits of the individual home. For the woman, the system has no avenues of fulfilment foreseen and provided beforehand for any impulse whatsoever outside the home itself.
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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.

Taft's thesis became one of the philosophical foundations of the feminist movement.

After completing her thesis in 1913 Taft desired an academic position but women of this era were mostly excluded from that life. So for over two decades she worked in the world of child and family services. Her first job was with Katherine Bement Davis as the assistant superintendent at the New York State Reformatory for Women. When Davis left the Reformatory so did Taft moving from the field of delinquency to the new field of mental hygiene as the Director of the Mental Hygiene Committee of the State Charities Aid Association of New York. 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. She wrote many papers and spoke often about what she had learned and the diagnostic techniques she pioneered for dealing with institutionalized children.

Finally in 1919 Taft was able to enter the academic world as a full-time faculty member of the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Policy and Practice.[5] The School was the first in the country to have an advanced curriculum focused on social work. Taft's thinking and teaching simulated and guided this program from its inception in 1934 until her retirement in 1950. 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." She was an articulate and well-known founder and proponent of the Rankian "functional" approach to both social work and to social work education. This approach was distinct from the widespread Freudian "diagnostic" approach to social work, and there was a marked contrast between the two. 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.[6]

Taft retired from the University of Pennsylvania after commencement in June 1950. For the first few years she still taught a few courses and was a consultant on the doctoral council. She then turned her full attention to translating and organizing the papers of Otto Rank which were given to her at the time of Rank's death in 1939. Rank's papers were given to Columbia University. Later the papers of Taft and Robinson were also given to Columbia.

Otto Rank (1884–1939) was an outcast disciple of Sigmund Freud. Rank met Freud in 1905 when Rank was just 21. Rank became Freud's protégé and closest associate. During the formative years of the psychoanalytic movement Rank was the recording secretary of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. 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. In 1926 Rank split publicly with Freud and was slowly ostracized from the psychoanalytic establishment.

Taft was first Otto Rank's patient, then his student and friend, and, finally, biographer and American exponent. After George H. Mead, Rank was the most influential person in Taft's professional life. 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. Taft "… was interested in psychoanalysis as a further training measure for myself in the future and I wanted to see who these analysts were and what they were like."[7]

Taft was impressed by Rank and arranged for analysis by him which took place in New York in the fall of 1926. Her motivation "… was not due to any conscious personal need nor the lack of professional success, but to the deep awareness of being stopped in professional development…. Psychological testing of children was useful but, as I knew only too well, it was not therapeutic."[8] To further her therapeutic skills she joined the Rankian group in New York in 1927.

In 1930 Rank introduced the idea of "will" therapy, a radical idea in academic circles. Will for Rank, as defined by Taft, "… is the integrated personality as original creative force, that which acts, not merely reacts, upon the environment."[9] Rank emphasized conscious will to explain human behavior. By contrast, Freud emphasized the subconscious. Unlike most of her medical colleagues Taft took this novel new idea in stride. "I had been brought up on pragmatism and the thinking of George Herbert Mead and John Dewey. For me there was nothing to lose."[10] Taft stood by Rank and his ideas but many others did not, and Rank was marginalized.

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. When Rank died in 1939 Taft was given all his papers and became his chief American exponent.

Taft incorporated Rank's ideas on "will" into her therapeutic social work, and even more significantly, into the training of social workers at the Pennsylvania School of Social Work.[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.

Carl Rogers (1902 – 1987) was an American psychologist and among the founders of the humanistic approach (or client-centered approach) to psychology. Taft played a significant role in Rogers' development of his non-directive approach by presenting her work to the staff of the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children in Rochester, while Rogers worked as the director there. Taft introduced Rogers to Rank's relational approach to therapy, which inspired Rogers to later meet Rank. Rogers was also inspired by Taft's book where she describes the step-by-step journey of working with two specific child clients; this was an early precedent for Rogers' subsequent research where he continued to "pull back the curtain" to explore what happens within a therapeutic relationship.[12]