A Brief History of Tavistock Relationships

In the 100 years since the birth of the Tavistock Clinic, a number of organisations have been part of the wider “Tavistock family” of institutions. These have included: the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, the Tavistock Institute of Medical Psychology, the Tavistock Career and Education Consultation Service, and Tavistock Relationships. The eminent psychiatrist Henry Dicks, writing at the time of the fiftieth anniversary of the Tavistock, saw it as having a corporate identity, within which these separate, constituent organisations “… are not only preserved but positively valued” . Tavistock Relationships is the organisation formerly known as the Family Discussion Bureau (FDB) when it was launched in 1948. For an organisation that has specialised in developing the psychoanalytic understanding of the couple relationship, it is apposite that it began its life as the progeny, so to speak, of a couple—Enid and Michael Balint—both of whom knew something of the difficulty of couple relationships as, for each of them, theirs was a second marriage. Needless to say, although this offers us a neat “oedipal” dimension to our beginning, the reality is a little more complicated. Perhaps, though, before we move on to discuss the historical detail it is worth observing that this “creation myth” of a founding couple which linked the Family Discussion Bureau with the Tavistock Clinic, contains a truth of the history of the close relationship between the two institutions. Throughout its lifetime, Tavistock Relationships has been a “sister” organisation to the Clinic, with a history of personal and professional links and sharing a common approach of rigorous grounding in clinical work as a basis for research, training, and the application of analytic thinking to the broadest range of human problems; a mission to reach people and touch areas of human experience that have not before had the benefit of analytic understanding. It is this distinctive “Tavistock approach”, with its fo