ABSTRACT
The promotion of psychoanalysis in its narrower sense however, was never a conscious aim of the founder or of the pre-war Tavistock group. H.C.M. saw in Freud's system the most coherent body of hypotheses with which to do ajob which was virtually done nowhere else in Britain. This was the task of understanding and relieving the suffering of all those conditions which had also been the field of interest and study for Freud and his circle, including the deviants, like Jung and Adler: the adult neuroses, perversions, character disorders, including those manifesting chiefly at somatic levels, and - it is an important and - the precursor states in children as postulated by the psychogenetic theory. It can be claimed that over most of its history the Tavistock group has been patient - or taskcentred rather than theory-centred, hence much more flexible and 'eclectic' (a term of mild abuse in some circles) than any orthodox 'school' could be in its choice of theoretical and heuristic approaches to concrete problems of diagnosis and therapy. It remained faithful, however, to the basic philosophy which required us to understand the whole person in his social and intrapsychic as well as his organismic aspects - a philosophy most clearly shown, even in 1920, by the Tavistock's multiprofessional handling of psychiatric problems, setting an early pattern of interdisciplinary team work in the study of real situations which often untidily straddle abstract disciplinary boundaries. This orientation to its tasks has, I think, enabled the
Tavistock's working principles to remain remarkably consistent and continuous. Given a non-doctrinal field of interest marked only by a few cardinal points, the growth, change and sophistication in relevant fields of knowledge served to broaden and enrich rather than to threaten its position as a medicopsychological institution. This enabled it after the Second World War to welcome the newer insights and workers not only from psychoanalysis proper, but also those from the growing disciplines of the behavioural and social sciences with their methodologies for the study of human interactions and group structures. The larger Tavistock organization of the last twenty years, with its clinical and its social research wings, thus became a natural nodal point for that transdisciplinary field we may call 'community psychiatry ("sociatry") and mental health', ranging from the social development of the human infant to the dynamics of the largest human group, seen as evolutionary continuities.
