Tavistock Clinic, London

   After the First World War, there was enormous interest in Britain in the treatment of such "functional nervous disorders" as the shell shock cases. (See POSTTRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER.) In 1920, Hugh Crichton-Miller (1877–1959), a neurologist who even before the war had opened a private nervous clinic, took the lead in founding a clinic based on the principles of psychoanalysis to serve individuals who could not afford private psychotherapy. (The services of the consulting staff, as often was the case in British hospitals in those days, were unpaid.) The clinic was named after its original location in Tavistock Square in the Bloomsbury district of London. Although it moved in 1932 to nearby Malet Place near University College (and after 1965 to Belsize Lane), the name Tavistock, or affectionately "The Tavi," became ineradicably associated with psychoanalysis and social psychiatry. Crichton-Miller stepped down in 1933, succeeded by John Rawlings Rees (1890–1969), who became chief of army psychiatry during the Second World War.

   After the war, the Tavi became influential in spreading theories of group therapy developed in part at Northfield Military Hospital near Birmingham by Tom Main (1911–1990). Wilfred R. Bion (1897–1979) and John Rickman (1891–1951) of the Tavi had also served briefly at Northfield; they described their group-therapy techniques in an article in the Lancet in 1943 and after the war contributed these experiences to the budding group therapy movement at the Tavi. (See PSYCHOTHERAPY: therapeutic community, [from 1939]). (Tom Main went on to become the director of the Cassell Hospital, another center of psychotherapy innovation.)

   In 1946 a sister body, the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, was set up to do research and training especially in social and industrial relations. As psychiatry historian Tom Harrison has written, "Northfield was . . . part of a much wider series of social-psychological innovations, much of which was taken up by the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations. It is through this organisation that many of the ideas were developed and broadcast to a wider audience. Their focus, however, moved away from psychiatry and mental illness to preventative work, particularly in industry" (Bion, Rickman, Foulkes and the Northfield Experiments, 2000, p. 268). In 1948, the Tavistock Clinic joined the National Health Service. After the war, the clinic established units for adult psychiatry (under John Derg ["Jock"] Sutherland [1905–1991]) and for child psychiatry (called the Department for Children and Parents), under John Bowlby, known for his work on "attachment theory." The Tavi, with its interest in psychoanalysis, family affairs, and group relations, was said to represent in England the counter-pole to the Maudsley Hospital, with its interest in epidemiology, quantitative research, and postgraduate training. Henry Victor Dicks (1900–1977), head of the marital unit at the clinic, said in his history, Fifty Years of the Tavistock Clinic (1970), that "Since its inception in 1920 the Tavistock has steadfastly represented and emphasized the psychodynamic aspects of psychiatry, and stood for ‘whole-person’ medicine vis-à-vis the trend of the times concerned increasingly with laboratory research and physico-chemical theories of health and disease" (pp. 298–299).