Psychoanalysis, management and labour in the British workplace, 1942-c.1970

Abstract

This dissertation examines the creation of a field of workplace psy-expertise in mid-twentieth century Britain, through four case studies and centring on two organisations: the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations and Roffey Park rehabilitation centre. While existing research on psychoanalysis has taken childhood and the family as sites of study, this thesis reveals the working world of adults as a parallel site where psy-science was mobilised in service of democracy. The first chapter traces the development of psychological job selection techniques first used in the British Armed Forces and then in the Civil Service and private industry. The second chapter explores a rehabilitation centre in West Sussex for patients suffering from ‘industrial neurosis’, which operated alongside a training institute schooling managers, doctors and trade unionists. In the third chapter, I follow researchers into the factory of a bearings manufacturer, reading their study alongside the vibrant and surreal company magazine. The fourth chapter examines psychoanalytic and ethnographic research into two psychiatric hospitals and one general hospital, where psychoanalysts grappled with interpreting feminised care work. These psy-experts attempted to transform psychiatry and psychoanalysis into a social science with commercial appeal for business consumers. However, I argue that psy-experts did not succeed in psychologising the workplace. Conventional ways of thinking about labour remained resilient, and psy-experts found they had to adapt their theories when collaborating with non-psychological interlocutors in government, trade unions and private industry. Moreover, I cast doubt on interpretations of psy-science as ushering in a modern, self- actualising and individualistic self, by excavating workplace psychiatry’s deep investment in the social. This thesis also offers a new framework for understanding Britain’s mid-century political economy, using workplace psychiatry to demonstrate the strength of public-private collaboration in the era of the social democratic state. Not only does this thesis illuminate the central role of capital in this period, but it also widens the horizons of labour and business history to incorporate the interpersonal, the surreal and the libidinal.