Throughout World War 2 the most serious cases of psychological problems were evacuated back to hospitals in England[1]. Northfield became the most famous of these.
Northfield was the military name for Hollywell Mental Hospital, the giant, dismal Victorian asylum in Birmingham, rigidly divided into medical and military zones[2]. It contained soldiers from active duty in France, escaped prisoners of war, patients from the RAF and men who had ‘disciplinary problems’, but also an above average number of men who had been decorated for valour, and many who were intelligent and articulate[3]. The military sent John Rickman there in July 1942 and in September that year he was followed by Wilfred Bion[4].
John Rickman was one of the most important psychoanalysts in Britain. He had studied at Cambridge under the famous World War 1 psychologist WHR Rivers[5]. He was one of the generation that had been analysed by Freud personally. Rickman had also been analysed by Ferenczi and Klein[6] and was friends with Karl Abraham and many others of the international community. He was a Quaker and conscientious objector[7], who had served in the ambulance service during World War 1[8]. He was also Wilfred Bion’s training analyst.
Wilfred Bion had been a tank commander in the World War 1 and would have been given a Victoria Cross if he had not sworn at officials in the War Office[9]. After being demobbed, he read history at Oxford University[10] and between the wars trained as a doctor and a psychoanalyst[11]. He started working at the Tavistock Clinic in 1932 and studying under JA Hadfield and went with him to the Portman Clinic. Just before the war he began a training analysis with John Rickman in 1938[12].
Although they stopped their analysis when the war started, they remained close. In January 1941, while visiting John Rickman at Wharncliffe Hospital he found ‘a balance of insecurity which was maintained by the doctors as much as the patients’[13]. Before long Bion joined Rickman at Wharncliffe as Command Psychiatrist[14]. The two of them then drafted a report that became known as the Wharncliffe Memorandum, which outlined to colleagues some of their ideas for treating neurosis through group therapy[15].
When Wilfred Bion arrived he was put in charge of the Training Wing and found that the main form of treatment was sedatives, for patients and doctors alike[16].Bion’s aim was to help the men remember that they were soldiers rather than patients and improve morale by creating a ‘good group spirit’[17].Bion wanted to recruit his patients into the ‘battle’ against neurosis[18]. Although Wilfred Bion sounded like a traditional army officer his methods were very unconventional[19]. He took a bold step. Instead of trying to take control and stop the indiscipline, he let things spiral out of control, allowing things to get so bad that the collective neurosis would be displayed, to the point where the men themselves would be driven by their own self-respect to find ways of controlling it themselves[20].
The men were told that they had to do an hour’s exercise every day and that each had to join a group[21]. For Bion the key thing that the men needed in order to be rehabilitated in to the army was ‘group membership skills’[22]. The men wanted to set up a dancing class[23]. Bion took the suggestion seriously and allowed the men to organise dancing lessons. After a month their daily meetings became business-like and Bion began to notice ‘an unmistakable esprit de corps[24]’. By deliberately distancing himself from a traditional position of authority Bion had created a situation where the men had to find their own authority[25].
The experiment had been running just six weeks, when suddenly both Rickman and Bion were given 48 hours to leave Northfield and report to other postings[26].Unfortunately, neither Rickman nor Bion had included the military establishment in their project. ‘Pearce told Rees, and Rees…’ had them posted off to where they ‘could do no harm’[27]. The Northfield experiment was summarily closed down,[28] with Rickman and Bion hastily posted elsewhere[29]. According to Eric Trist Bion was very angry[30]. With hindsight Bion was able to look back and see that his experiment had caused ‘a powerful release of emotion’[31] and that often patients can feel a violent hatred to their psychiatrist. What he perhaps didn’t see at the time was that the army itself was part of the wider group, and that a common characteristic of what he was to call ‘assumption groups’ ‘is the hostility with which they oppose any stimulus for growth or development’[32].
Although JR Rees had closed the experiment down, it had been a political move and two years later at the end of 1944 a second Northfield experiment began[33], but this time a little more carefully, by Michael Foulkes, Harold Bridger and Tom Main[34]. This second experiment can be regarded as the birthplace of the ‘therapeutic community’[35].
This time JR Rees and Ronald Hargreaves gradually expanded the small-scale group therapy that Michael Foulkes was conducting at Northfield. Meanwhile Hargreaves recruited Major Harold Bridger to take Bion’s place running the training wing[36].
Michael Foulkes, originally Siegfried Heinrich Fuchs, was one of the first German psychoanalysts to emigrate to Britain[37]. He had trained in medicine in Vienna and was influenced by Herbert Marcuse and the Frankfurt School of Marxist sociologists[38] as well as by Freud[39].
Before the war Harold Bridger had been a maths teacher in Coventry[40]. In the Army he was initially put in charge of an anti-aircraft battery, but in 1943 transferred to the War Office Selection Boards, where Ronald Hargreaves was particularly impressed by how he handled group discussions[41].
With Hargreaves support Harold Bridger abolished the Training Wing, turning it into ‘the Hospital Club’ and then left it empty until the patients decided to do something with it[42]. What happened after some weeks was that the men summoned Bridger and the hospital’s commanding officer, demanding to know why public money was being wasted during wartime[43]. The commander was horrified, but Bridger was delighted and helped them start organising recreational activities themselves[44]. According to Foulkes, letting the patients organise things themselves changed the atmosphere of the whole hospital and made the patients much more engaged[45].
In spite of the seeming success of what was going on ‘tremendous tensions’ developed between Bridger and Foulkes[46]. It was into this mix that the third component – Tom Main – was introduced[47].
Tom Main had trained as a psychiatrist before the war and was recruited by JR Rees, initially to work on recruitment procedures with Ronald Hargreaves[48], then working in forward psychiatry first with Montgomery’s 8th Army in Africa[49] and after that worked on morale with the paratroopers[50]. He was even selected as the psychiatric advisor for the Normandy invasion[51].
When Tom Main arrived to take command of Northfield in early 1945 he inherited a situation where there was ‘much indiscipline’, the military hierarchy was very unhappy, and non-psychiatric staff at the hospital felt excluded[52].
Tom Main considered the aim of the hospital was to be ‘the resocialisation of the neurotic individual for life in ordinary society’[53] and rather than closing down the experiment, as the military might have liked, he chose to expand it to create a ‘therapeutic community’[54] in which a ‘total culture of enquiry’ involved everyone at the hospital[55].
In terms of thought, Main was closer to Bion and Bridger than Foulkes, but Main also believed that there was still a need for individual therapy, particularly in cases of mourning[56]. Tom Main contributed to the success of the second experiment through the greater attention paid to the wider community, by involving a larger staff group involved, and running it at a slower pace[57].
By the end of 1945 most of the analysts were keen to get back to civilian life. Bion, Bridger, Foulkes and Rickman all joined the Tavistock Clinic and initiated a new phase in its history. Tom Main briefly joined the ‘Tavistock Group’[58], then worked with the Civil Resettlement Units, before becoming Medical Director of the Cassel Hospital for Functional Nervous Disorders in 1946, where he worked for the next 30 years[59].
The Northfield experiments are considered a key moment in the history of psychiatry, group therapy, and organisational studies[60]. In particular the first Northfield experiment was ‘a manifestation of creative genius’[61]. Bion had turned the notion of authority on its head[62]’[63].
Footnotes
[1] T Harrison and D Clarke, ‘The Northfield Experiments’, p699, British Journal of Psychiatry, 160. 1992
[2] B Shephard, War of Nerves, p258, Jonathan Cape, 2000
[3] T Harrison and D Clarke, ‘The Northfield Experiments’, p698, British Journal of Psychiatry, 160. 1992
[4] S Kraemer, ‘The dangers of this atmosphere’: a Quaker connection in the Tavistock Clinic’s development, p89, History of the Human Sciences, 24(2), 2011
[5] B Shephard, War of Nerves, p258, Jonathan Cape, 2000
[6] B Shephard, War of Nerves, p258, Jonathan Cape, 2000
[7] S Kraemer, ‘Narrative Matters: Stop Running and Start Thinking’, p381, Child and Adolescent Mental Health 23, No. 4, 2018
[8] B Shephard, War of Nerves, p258, Jonathan Cape, 2000
[9] S Kraemer, ‘The dangers of this atmosphere’: a Quaker connection in the Tavistock Clinic’s development, p83, History of the Human Sciences, 24(2), 2011
[10] S Kraemer, ‘The dangers of this atmosphere’: a Quaker connection in the Tavistock Clinic’s development, p84, History of the Human Sciences, 24(2), 2011
[11] T Harrison and D Clarke, ‘The Northfield Experiments’, p701, British Journal of Psychiatry, 160. 1992
[12] S Kraemer, ‘The dangers of this atmosphere’: a Quaker connection in the Tavistock Clinic’s development, p84-85, History of the Human Sciences, 24(2), 2011
[13] G Bléandonu, Wilfred Bion: His Life and Works 1897-1979, p54, Free Association Books, 1999 [1994]
[14] P King, No Ordinary Psychoanalyst: The Exceptional Contributions of John Rickman, p36, Karnac, 2003
[15] P King, No Ordinary Psychoanalyst: The Exceptional Contributions of John Rickman, p36, Karnac, 2003
[16] B Shephard, War of Nerves, p259, Jonathan Cape, 2000
[17] S Kraemer, ‘The dangers of this atmosphere’: a Quaker connection in the Tavistock Clinic’s development, p89, History of the Human Sciences, 24(2), 2011
[18] T Harrison and D Clarke, ‘The Northfield Experiments’, p699, British Journal of Psychiatry, 160. 1992
[19] S Kraemer, ‘The dangers of this atmosphere’: a Quaker connection in the Tavistock Clinic’s development, p89, History of the Human Sciences, 24(2), 2011
[20] B Shephard, War of Nerves, p259, Jonathan Cape, 2000
[21] S Kraemer, ‘The dangers of this atmosphere’: a Quaker connection in the Tavistock Clinic’s development, p89, History of the Human Sciences, 24(2), 2011
[22] P King, No Ordinary Psychoanalyst: The Exceptional Contributions of John Rickman, p41, Karnac, 2003
[23] B Shephard, War of Nerves, p259, Jonathan Cape, 2000
[24] B Shephard, War of Nerves, p259, Jonathan Cape, 2000
[25] S Kraemer, ‘The dangers of this atmosphere’: a Quaker connection in the Tavistock Clinic’s development, p90, History of the Human Sciences, 24(2), 2011
[26] P King, No Ordinary Psychoanalyst: The Exceptional Contributions of John Rickman, p41, Karnac, 2003
[27] WR Bion, All My Sins Remembered, p58, Routledge, 1985
[28] S Kraemer, ‘The dangers of this atmosphere’: a Quaker connection in the Tavistock Clinic’s development, p90, History of the Human Sciences, 24(2), 2011
[29] B Shephard, War of Nerves, p260, Jonathan Cape, 2000
[30] G Bléandonu, Wilfred Bion: His Life and Works 1897-1979, p61, Free Association Books, 1999 [1994]
[31] W Bion, ‘Psychiatry in a Time of Crisis’, p81, British Journal of Medical Psychology, XXI(2):81, 1948
[32] L Grinberg, New Introduction to the Work of Bion, p13, Jason Aronson, 1993 [1975]
[33] B Shephard, War of Nerves, p262, Jonathan Cape, 2000
[34] B Shephard, War of Nerves, p262-267, Jonathan Cape, 2000
[35] G Bléandonu, Wilfred Bion: His Life and Works 1897-1979, p63, Free Association Books, 1999 [1994]
[36] B Shephard, War of Nerves, p265, Jonathan Cape, 2000
[37] B Shephard, War of Nerves, p262, Jonathan Cape, 2000
[38] T Harrison and D Clarke, ‘The Northfield Experiments’, p702, British Journal of Psychiatry, 160. 1992
[39] B Shephard, War of Nerves, p262, Jonathan Cape, 2000
[40] T Harrison and D Clarke, ‘The Northfield Experiments’, p701, British Journal of Psychiatry, 160. 1992
[41] B Shephard, War of Nerves, p265, Jonathan Cape, 2000
[42] B Shephard, War of Nerves, p265-266, Jonathan Cape, 2000
[43] B Shephard, War of Nerves, p266, Jonathan Cape, 2000
[44] B Shephard, War of Nerves, p266, Jonathan Cape, 2000
[45] B Shephard, War of Nerves, p266, Jonathan Cape, 2000
[46] B Shephard, War of Nerves, p267, Jonathan Cape, 2000
[47] B Shephard, War of Nerves, p267, Jonathan Cape, 2000
[48] B Shephard, War of Nerves, p247, Jonathan Cape, 2000
[49] ‘Obituary’, British Medical Journal, Volume 300, 30 June 1990
[50] HV Dicks, 50 Years of the Tavistock Clinic, p108, Routledge, 1970
[51] TT Hayley, ‘Thomas Forrest Main (1911–1990)’, p719-722, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 72, 1991
[52] B Shephard, War of Nerves, p267, Jonathan Cape, 2000
[53] TF Main, T. F. ‘The hospital as a therapeutic institution’. p66-70, Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic, 10, 1946
[54] ‘Obituary’, British Medical Journal, Volume 300, 30 June 1990
[55] B Shephard, War of Nerves, p267, Jonathan Cape, 2000
[56] B Shephard, War of Nerves, p267, Jonathan Cape, 2000
[57] T Harrison and D Clarke, ‘The Northfield Experiments’, p698, British Journal of Psychiatry, 160. 1992
[58] HV Dicks, 50 Years of the Tavistock Clinic, p139, Routledge, 1970
[59] TT Hayley, ‘Thomas Forrest Main (1911–1990)’, p719-722, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 72, 1991
[60] AV White, From the Science of Selection to Psychologising Civvy Street: The Tavistock Group, 1939-1948, p1, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) thesis, University of Kent, 2016
[61] G Bléandonu, Wilfred Bion: His Life and Works 1897–1979, p63, London: Free Association Books, 1994
[62] P Miller and N Rose, ‘On Therapeutic Authority: Psychoanalytical Expertise under Advanced Liberalism’, p29-64, History of the Human Sciences 7(3), 1994
[63] S Kraemer, ‘The dangers of this atmosphere’: a Quaker connection in the Tavistock Clinic’s development, p91, History of the Human Sciences, 24(2), 2011