The Genesis of Tavistock Institute

Speaker A Now, I'll give you a little bit of background about Tavistock. You may not all know this, but the Tavistock Institute actually grew out of Havasoc Clinic of Medical Psychology, which was formed after the First World War. And after the First World War, nobody really understood shell shock, so people were being shot for malingering and they were just bound up, of course, after a couple of years in the trenches. So that was a collection of doctors essentially working on the problem of what are these traumas that soldiers suffer? What were the problems of resettlement of veterans when they come back from the war traumatized? And that was the Tavistock Clinic, which was essentially medical. It was called Tavistock. They sat down in Tavistock Square in London and the Tavistock Clinic had been running all that time. Most of them were shrinks. Mainly they were psychoactrists who were also psychoanalysts. And that work continues, and that's the work.

Speaker B Public institution, government or private.

Speaker A It lived on government money, mainly through grants rather than a block thing. And then, of course, they did the important work during the war. That's the wonderful thing. I love living among the English, and it's funny, I just laugh all the time. I have the feeling they're putting it on for my benefit. You meet chaps in clubs and they say, you think, no, you're from central casting. It's not possible. However, the important thing about the wartime period was they were absolutely hopeless choosing officers. The way they chose officers, especially in the army, was worse than random. I mean, they were going to chaps, it doesn't work in wartime, but they were smart enough to see you need to do something clever. So they invented the wasby, and that was invented by Wilfred Bjorn, the War Officer Selection Board, which is group methods of selection, looking for the nap. You all know the stories. Finding out through observation what emerges naturally from the wit and the application and seriousness of the person from then on. They were absolutely brilliant at choosing officers and they were choosing officers from all classes and all types and sizes, but they were using group methods to find out who had this thing.

Speaker B And A k. Rice was part of that group.

Speaker A Rice came later. That's another great pairing. I mean, Rice and Miller were another one of those extraordinary pairs. I worked very closely with Ken Rice. Eric Miller's only just died. A lot of these pairs of men were forming and reforming, but Rice came much later. He came after the war. He wasn't even one of the founders of the Tabletspot Institute. I'm coming to that in a minute. But all this work was going on in the war, which had to do with leadership and teamwork, and it was basic stuff. The work that beyond did on dependence, fight flight and pairing stuff as part of the language now was just basic stuff. Basic in the sense that Ro was basic trace. So that work had gone on during the war by the clinic. After the war, government was very interested in these discoveries that made and wanted to encourage the creation of a new institution which became the Tavistock Institute. So the Tavistock Institute was set up in parallel with the Tavistock Clinic. They still operate separately and the clinic was basically medical. I mean, the original members of the Tavistock Institute were all psychoanalystically trained. That was part of the deal. I think I was one of the very few people in Tavistock who'd never been an on the sand. I used to patiently explain to my colleagues that in order to understand phenomenon transference, it wasn't necessary to be, but they didn't believe it. It didn't matter. We got along fine. I was in some ways more combative than they were, so that was okay. But the Institute comes on stream in 1948. It's actually funded by Rutofeller. All the seed corn money for the Tavistock Institute came from Rupefeller Foundation. That was 1946. It was chartered in 47 and opened its doors in 48. And almost the first project was Glacier. Why? Because Wilfred Brown said, we want this stuff, and that Wilfred Brown was just using everything with his hands on to run his experiment.

Speaker B When Elliot went to the UK during the war and got involved in officer.

Speaker A Candidates, he was also involved in that stuff. That's right.

Speaker B But was that through the no.

Speaker A Oh, yes. Excuse me. The work that was being done, that was the Tavistock Printing Club. So he was associated that's where he.

Speaker B Was during the war, at the end of the war.

Speaker A I'm a bit vague on this part of the story, but he was certainly working with Be on he worked for waroc during the war. Right.

Speaker B But I'm just trying to understand was in the clinic. Right, okay. So it wasn't in the military. It was for the military.

Speaker A In the clinic. He was an officer. Yeah.

Speaker B I never knew this.

Speaker A Wilfred Bion was a brigadier. Wilfred Bjorn was really your upright, posh English officer class. And it fit his psychoanalyland background. It all fit together.

Speaker B Oh, Melanie Klein was later.

Speaker A She'd been around all that time, but up the shrinking end of the and we all know Elliot had his had his analysis with when did he have his analysis? In the 30s or after the war?

Speaker B After he came back from Harvard.

Speaker A After he came back? Yeah, that's what he told me. I think that's correct. Okay, tell me if this gets boring. So, I mean, the development of events is so interesting in how this runs. So in 48 we now have the Telescop Institute and the founding members are people like Harold Bridger and is billing us. It's just a powerhouse of clever people. You had Tristan Bamforth, you see, doing the extraordinary work up in the whole sociotechnical systems thing. It branched out pretty quick. The whole group relations people, which was partly miller and Rice and that Gang and also Bridger. Then you had the operations Research arm, which is a man called Friend and you had the Socio technical Systems people, which was Tristan Banforth, who were working in the coal mines in the north of the very fertile. You have these different threads of work which are all really based on the notion that there is an underlying psychology to organisational life and it'll bite you in the ankle unless you're conscious of it and organize for it. For example, I think one of the brilliant pieces of work done in that period was done by Isabel Mingus who wrote a paper and Judas Is Working. I'll put this in my bibliography. She wrote a paper in 1961 called The Operation of a Social System as a Defense against Anxiety and it's the most extraordinary analysis of why the organization and training of nurses is invariably dysfunctional for patients. One of those unintended consequences studies and classic piece of Tavistock work because it was digging into the underlying psychology of the system. Her reading of it was that there's nothing you can do about a nurse's work. A nurse's work is anxiety provoked, it's unavoidable. Her argument was unless you acknowledge that and consciously and deliberately organize around the anxiety, then the system will find its own way of handling the anxiety and that will be dysfunctional for the patient. So you can't just leave it to the system. The problems were that nurses are not given any authority whatsoever. They treated like children, triple checked on everything. The kind of continuity of care that's important to the patient is just chopped up to protect the nurse from what comes with continuity of care, which is attachment. I mean, all these very in a way, simple psychological insights came to bear in this paper and it's a very psychoanalytical kind of a paper, but to read as a bit of analysis of an operating system just extraordinary. I think that's a tabletop paper. It was originally a tabletop paper. There's a double volume of tabletop paper being published.