Who Is the ``Self'' in Self-Aware: Professional Self-Awareness from a Critical Theory Perspective

Professional self-awareness is widely considered a necessary condition for competent social work practice. Alternate prescriptions for self-awareness rely implicitly on varying definitions o f 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 o f whatever is being exper ienced) , (b) reflective awareness (awareness o f a self who is experiencing something) , and (c) reflexive awareness (the self's awareness o f how his or her awareness is constituted in direct exper ience) . Strengths and limitations o f 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 o f practitioner selfawareness. The article concludes with illustrations from practice.