Harold Bridger, T.D., D.Litt., B.Sc. 1909-2005

In two recent issues of this journal, Stan Gold and I published a series of conversations and recollections of Harold Bridger. Last May Harold died; below is a very brief and more formal account of his life.

Harold Bridger was a mathematician who became a psychoanalyst and consultant to organisations. He was the last surviving founding member of the Tavistock Institute.

What distinguished him from many others who apply psychoanalytic thinking to organisational life was recognising the relevance and importance of the context and setting within which internal processes take place, at the same time as paying intense attention to those processes. Both working with organisations and in his Working Conferences, this became known as his ‘double-task approach’.

Harold was born on 15 May 1909, the eldest of five children of a Russian émigré. He studied mathematics and became a maths teacher. During the Second World War, as a major in the army, he commanded anti-aircraft batteries before being transferred to the War Office Selection Boards. Psychiatrists, psychologists and other social scientists, largely from the Tavistock Clinic, were helping the army with officer selection on the basis, promoted by Wilfred Bion, of groups in which candidates for leadership roles were confronted with experiences requiring the capacity both to achieve objectives and to take account of internal - individual or group - tensions.

Bion later applied group principles in Northfield Military Hospital, where men who had broken down in battle or in unit life were treated. This was the first ‘Northfield Experiment’, conducted in the training wing of the hospital. It worked, but was closed down after six weeks because of the chaos that resulted in the rest of the hospital. Major Bridger was assigned there and, on the basis of his teaching and WOSB experiences, added the dimension of context, designing the whole hospital to run as a therapeutic community: a place where the hospital itself, with al