On May 19-20, 2025, a preparatory seminar for the conference “Planetary Health: An Interdisciplinary Phenomenon for a Cultural Approach to the Person or Client, Past, Present, Future” was held at Semmelweis University in Budapest. The seminar discussed the relationship between human health, ecological systems, and the abandonment of an ideological approach to the client in the name of a competent culture. Conclusions: the social work profession should not be limited to one understanding of it, because the social work profession is creative and must develop first as a science and only then as a practice. In our country, the process is the other way around – monopolized. K. Marx and S. Freud represented a strong secular influence on social work theory. They achieved a strong ideological accent in the profession. However, a social work professional must understand a person in a wide interdisciplinary palette, which a Marxist approach does not offer. The leveling-off occurs by exaggerating the services of psychology and psychotherapy, presenting them as scientifically unproven effects.

Therefore, social work education must be able to accumulate intellectual resources that would not allow social workers to get stuck in situations of “totalizying Marxist-oriented knowledge”. The interdisciplinary context is dynamic – the synthesis of neo-patristic knowledge, phenomenology, theology, philosophy, sociology, axiology, classical psychology, neuroscience, which offers three dynamic types of congruence or antagonism: 1) conflicting or only Marxist-understood social work and a convulsive hold on it; a phenomenon that slows down the development of the profession); 2) dialogue between problem-oriented and client-oriented social work; 3) interaction between the two in science and practice.

EKrA Rector prof. Skaidrīte Gūtmane has been a member of the editorial board of the SU scientific journal “Journal of Mental Health” for several years.