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Ever since the publication of Freud's Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego psychoanalysis has demonstrated a consistent interest in the human group. However it was not until the Second World War that a coherent body of work first emerged which was devoted to applying psychoanalytic insights to group, organisational and social phenomena. Indeed, as with Kurt Lewin's work on small groups in the USA, it was war which provided the catalyst. In the UK psychiatrists and others associated with the Tavistock Clinic made a series of innovative, and at times controversial contributions to the war effort in areas such as officer selection and the rehabilitation of soldiers traumatised by combat. In this enterprise, the work of Bion, Rickman, Foulkes, Main, Trist and others offered the first practical demonstration of the value of applying psychoanalytic insights beyond the consulting room. The creation of the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in 1947 was a key moment in the development and institutionalization of this tradition. It provided the setting for a range of important research studies, often in close collaboration with members of the Tavistock Clinic, undertaken in the following decade. From these a discernible paradigm began to emerge, referred to by Barry Palmer in an essay in this volume as the ‘Tavistock Tradition’.
It is worth reflecting upon some of the primary ingredients which contributed to this paradigm. Firstly, it was heavily influenced by Kleinian thought, perhaps not surprising given that it was in the period after the Second World War that the Kleinians, at first largely concentrated in London, launched themselves as a distinct group within the world psychoanalytic movement. Indeed, in 1945 Bion started analysis with Melanie Klein and resumed his training at the Institute of Psycho-Analysis. As a consequence a range of concepts such as splitting, projective identification, persecutory anxiety and, later, the container/contained have found t