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When Isabel Menzies Lyth retired from her various roles at the Tavistock Institute, I remember the loss of her edgy, wise presence. She had been recruited onto the Institute's Council at a time when the main strategic debates were coalescing around social policy research versus action research and consulting. She was as likely to come down on the side of economics and capability as she was to argue in favour of a sensible approach to human resources management.
I cannot claim to have known Isabel well, but I am certain that she is ‘inside’ me as an archetype: a true elder of the Tavistock Institute's traditions internalized as the image of woman action researcher ageing deeply. For me, she combined a commitment both to psychoanalysis and to organizational analysis. I wonder where the Institute would be today if Isabel's health hadn't forced her to withdraw from Council and its committees. It did take us a decade to reclaim our action research and consulting heritage.
In teaching consultants and change managers, I still use her story of how the nurses didn't like her ‘mechanisms of defence’ paper. Isabel, herself, seemed unable to accept the full scientific influence of that work precisely because the difficulties of helping the client system work with the ideas remained very much in her memory. Elliot Jacques once told me that he thought Isabel's version of social defences was much more seminal than his own paper on the topic. Happily, the two well-respected volumes of essays she produced from ‘retirement’ (Menzies Lyth , ) recorded her scholarly practice at the Tavistock Institute, clearly much broader than credited previously.
Dr Jean E. Neumann PhD
Director of Studies and Core Faculty, Advanced Organisational Change, and Consulting Programme, The Tavistock Institute, London