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Observation that includes the observer, as Sebastian Kraemer puts it, could be regarded as the hallmark of the Tavistock approach for which the Clinic is justifiably famous - in all the regions of the world. And that leads to a ‘sociatry’, a cure of social systems and not just of the individual psyche as it engages in society. The great advantage of the Tavistock is its continuous reflection on its organizational ‘self’ built into its renewal in 1945. This is a companion to Henry Dicks' (1970) volume on the first 50 years. Dicks ably wrote a workaday history of the first half-century, plotting the continuity up to 1970. The present volume overlaps, concentrating on the period after the Second World War when the Tavistock resurrected and renovated itself. Implicitly, this book seems to plot a discontinuity in which the eclectic founding tradition was built on, and perhaps built over, by the new ideas in the 1940s, mostly from psychoanalysis. Little reference is made to the first phase of the Tavistock, although Brett Kahr (Chapter 6) reviews the great and the good in London society who brought the Clinic into existence in September 1920 and supported it until it became the extraordinary specialist service incorporated in 1948 into the new National Health Service.
In the final afterword, Kraemer documents the post-WW2 resurrection - Operation Phoenix - fittingly published by the adventurous new publisher seeking to put psychoanalysis back onto the bookshelves. But Kraemer confides his growing sadness at the increasingly inclement context for the Clinic in today's society that hesitates uncertainly about the value of public service provision.
However, overall, this is less of a history and more of a celebration of the Tavistock's work in the last 50-60 years. That is to say, it is the work within the living memory of the authors of the chapters. Of course, that phenomenal amount of original work deserves celebration even though its constant innovation has sometimes been