Psychological Subjects: Identity, Culture, and Health in Twentieth-Century Britain (review)

Mathew Thomson has established himself, in a number of groundbreaking and justly praised publications, as one of Britain's leading historians of mental health and mental deficiency. In the work under review he has built upon and expanded his earlier research to produce what he describes as "a study of the shifting character of psychological thought and practice in twentieth-century Britain" (p. 289). As this suggests, his book is not therefore an institutional or intellectual history of psychology, although it has much to say of significance for these fields; rather, it deals with how, and to what extent, psychology permeated both elite and popular culture and thought. This is done, for the most part, through a series of carefully chosen case studies. For example, Thomson discusses the popularity of psychology with the working-class Plebs League in the interwar period. The range of psychological thought recommended to Plebs League readers was eclectic; one reading list, for instance, embraced Freud and Adler, as well as British psychologists such as William McDougall (p. 151). This brings out an important point about this book—namely that, especially but not exclusively at the popular level, twentieth-century Britons took what they wanted from psychological thought without for the most part following one particular school. In turn, this alerts us to one of Thomson's central claims: that the "Whiggish" story of Freudianism progressively gaining hold is, at the very least, in need of qualification. Continuity was as important as change, and in any event, competing psychological theories and practices also influenced British society at various levels and to varying degrees.

If continuity was important, so too was the relationship between psychology and social and moral values, some of which were likewise of long-standing significance in British society. The working-class autodidact of the early part of the twentieth century who read psychology did so in part with the aim of self-improvement. In the same period, but dealing with a very different section of society, Thomson shows how elite doctors, and then the medical profession more generally, saw in psychology the possibility of "a return to a more holistic approach within medicine" and thus away from a strictly materialist outlook (p. 196). In a different historical context, and again with a different "audience" in mind, post-1945 psychology had much to say about child rearing and education—although, as is rightly pointed out, this too was a phenomenon with a long pedigree.

As will already be evident, this is a work with an extraordinarily impressive range and intellectual command of its materials. Aside from the points noted above, Thomson also, among other things, forces us to rethink the significance or otherwise of the "new" psychology of the early part of the century, and of the actual impact during and after the First World War of "shell-shock." It is, of course, the sign of an outstanding historical work that it leaves the reader wishing for more. For example, the author makes some interesting but too-brief comments about psychology and social work; this is a much underexplored issue, with particular significance attaching to the setting up by the London School of Economics of its Diploma in Mental Health in the late 1920s. Similarly, there has been a lot of important work recently on the psychologizing of homosexuality, which might have been engaged with.¹

But these are minor quibbles. Thomson has produced a book of considerable significance, and one that can be read with profit by historians of medicine, the social sciences, and high and low culture.