Table Of ContentPSYCHOLOGICAL SUBJECTS
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Psychological Subjects
Identity, Culture, and Health in
Twentieth-Century Britain
MATHEW THOMSON
1
3
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Acknowledgements
This book began its life in research on mental hygiene in the first half of the twen-
tieth century, looking, in retrospect rather too ambitiously, to adopt an interna-
tional comparative approach. For a brief period this research was funded by a
British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship, based at the Wellcome Unit for the
History of Medicine at the University of Oxford, under the guidance in particular
of my former supervisor Paul Weindling and with the benefit of further advice
from its then Director, Richard Smith. During this period, I received a scholarship
from the Rockefeller Foundation to visit their superb archive, resulting in a body
of research that if not directly evident in this book does profoundly shape several
of its underlying assumptions. The Fellowship was cut short by my appointment
as a Wellcome Lecturer in the History of Medicine at the University of Sheffield,
where I spent five happy years in the Department of History. Here I must thank
John Woodward for his constant support. I also benefited immensely from being
in a department led with such energy by Ian Kershaw. I was lucky to find such a
good friend in the department as Stephen Salter, who always helped me to keep
things academic in proper perspective. Bob Shoemaker, David Martin, Robert
Cook, Peter Gurney, and Graham Smith were all good companions in the
Clarkehouse Road building. And Erica Sheen in English was always ready to talk
ideas and dogs. During this time at Sheffield, the focus of my research became
more narrowly British, but it took wings in other ways, and I thank the depart-
ment for providing an environment to make this possible. In 1998, I moved to the
Department of History at the University of Warwick, which has been quietly
long-suffering about the slow pace of progress on the promised book. The
University, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and the Wellcome Trust
have all helped me towards completion. At Warwick, I have found myself once
again in a hugely stimulating environment, not just in terms of the staff, but also
the undergraduate and postgraduate students who have been such a pleasure to
teach. Postgraduates past and present, Vicky Long, Sheryl Root, and Brooke
Whitelaw are all now in a position to teach me about aspects of this study. Trips up
and down the M40 have been made so much better through being able to share
talk with Maxine Berg, Margot Finn, and Colin Jones, who have all been hugely
supportive. I have also been fortunate to have Hilary Marland as a colleague, and
to have benefited from the collegiate environment of seminars, workshops, and
research projects that she has fostered in the Centre for the History of Medicine.
Outside of Warwick, Rhodri Hayward has accompanied me in this path of
research, and I have learnt much from him in discussion, as I have from Peter
Barham, Ben Shephard, Deborah Thom, Graham Richards, and Jonathan Toms.
For help and encouragement over the years, I owe thanks to Roy Porter, Michael
vi Acknowledgements
Neve, Roger Cooter, Jose Harris, Peter Mandler, and Carolyn Steedman. I have
also benefited from invitations to hear about the Dutch experience in conferences
organised first by Marijke Gisjwijt-Hofstra and now Frank Huissman and Harry
Oosterhuis, with their wonderful hospitality. At Oxford University Press, I would
like to thank Anne Gelling, Kay Rogers, and Katie Ryde. I also owe a debt of grat-
itude to Peter Mandler and the other reader on the initial manuscript for support-
ing it and offering such useful advice on revision. Finally, life would have been far
duller, though quieter, if it had not been for the wonderful presence of my chil-
dren Grace and Joseph, and impossible without the support of Michelle.
M.T.
Wolvercote, 2005.
Contents
List of Abbreviations viii
Introduction 1
PART I: PSYCHOLOGIES OF THE NEW AGE
1. Practical Psychology 17
2. Reframing the Discipline 54
3. After the New Age 76
PART II: PROBLEMS AND PROSPECTS
4. Psychology and Education 109
5. Psychology and the Problem of Industrial Civilisation 140
6. Medicine and the Psychological 173
PART III: ENDS
7. Psychology and the Mid-Century Crisis 209
8. Towards the Permissive Society 250
Conclusion 289
Bibliography 295
Index 323
List of Abbreviations
BJEP British Journal of Educational Psychology
BLPES British Library of Political and Economic Science
BMA British Medical Association
BMJ British Medical Journal
CAPA Campaign against Psychiatric Activities
CMAC Contemporary Medical Archives Centre
HMSO Her Majesty’s Stationery Office
JNIIP Journal of the National Institute for Industrial Psychology
NAMH National Association for Mental Health
NIIP National Institute for Industrial Psychology
PRO Public Record Office
UNESCO United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization
WEA Workers’ Educational Association
WFMH World Federation for Mental Health
Introduction
This is a book about how twentieth-century Britons viewed both themselves and
their world in psychological terms.¹It examines the extent to which psychological
thought and practice could mediate, not just understanding of the self, but also a
wide range of social and economic, political, and ethical issues that rested on
assumptions about human nature. Despite some fine studies of the institutional
development of psychology as an academic discipline and profession and of the
diffusion of psychoanalytic thought to an educated public, this broader historical
subject remains strikingly undeveloped.
Psychological Subjectsargues that if we want to pursue this line of inquiry we need
to be wary of projecting back our own view of what constituted psychological
modernity and confining the scope of analysis accordingly. It sets out to broaden
our appreciation of the types of psychological thinking that were available, and
examines some of the hitherto largely unappreciated practices, movements, and
debates that this inspired. On this basis, it develops a picture of the appeal, style,
and ramifications of psychology within this culture that is more variegated and
therefore vigorous, and of a rather different overall character, than is often
assumed. In order to achieve this, the range of the book has been necessarily
broad. It brings together high and low psychological cultures, and something in
between the two: the professional and academic, the popular and here the ‘practi-
cal’, and the intellectual. It addresses not just psychology’s relation to thinking
about the individual, but also about the social. It focuses not just on health, but
also on education, economic life, and politics. It also reaches from the start of the
century right up to the 1970s. Such scope has benefits as well as drawbacks. It
enables the book to arrive at a number of theses about the correspondence
between expert and popular thought and about the nature of change over time. It
also, however, means that coverage has necessarily been selective and that the
¹ It does not attempt to analyse the past in psychological terms, though its findings may help to
develop more nuanced work in this area. On the psycho-historical approach: P. Gay, Freud for
Historians (New York and Oxford, 1985), P. Loewenberg, Decoding the Past: The Psychoanalytic
Approach (New York, 1983). For an example of application to the history of modern Britain:
G.Dawson, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of Masculinities(London,
1994). Nor is it directly a contribution to a history of emotion, whose focus is more specific, and
which is more interested in charting patterns of behaviour in the past. See for instance, Carol and
Peter N. Stearns (eds.), Emotion and Social Change: Toward a New Psychohistory (New York and
London, 1988); W. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions
(Cambridge, 2001). Nevertheless, its findings about the shifting position of emotionality in psycho-
logical thought, particularly the ongoing reservations and modes of accommodation, should be of
interest for such work.
