Tansley's Psychoanalytic Network: An Episode Out of the Early History of Psychoanalysis in England

There is no need to dwell on the difference between life in Cambridge and the lives of our ancestors a few thousand years ago.

In a wide-ranging and well-informed article, Hinshelwood (1995, pp. 135-51) distinguished seven points of entry for psychoanalysis into British cultural life in the period 1895 to roughly 1925: the Society for Psychical Research; Havelock Ellis and the development of sexology; psychological developments within psychiatry, associated with W.H.R. Rivers, Bernard Hart, May Sinclair and the Brunswick Square Clinic; the Psycho-Medical Society and the formation of a Medical Section of the British Psychological Society during World War I; the ‘literary’ strand, dominated by the Bloomsbury Group's intense interest up until the early 1920s; progressive education, including Homer Lane and somewhat later A.S. Neill; discussion in philosophical circles, including the influence of Bergson's and Rivers's work. The path taken by the career of Sir Arthur Tansley (Figure 1, p. 202)—and, as we shall see, some of his colleagues—indicates that this classification scheme, while useful, might be insufficient.1

To the seven paths Hinshelwood lists, we need to add a road to the unconscious which will be neither medical nor psychological, neither philosophical nor literary in character. To map this road, since covered over and silted up, this study examines a number of eminent scientists, nearly all from