Relationship Versus Authority: Psychiatric Social Work, Therapeutic Communities, and the Sujectivity of the Child, c1930-c1970. (360G-Wellcome-080161_Z_06_Z)

This project will examine residential child care and treatment developed in psychiatric social work and at therapeutic communities between the 1930s and the 1970s. It will reconstruct and historically contextualise the emergence of a new psychiatric model of subjectivity associated with this activity. The inter-war New Psychology considered emotionality key to mental health. But the new model appears to have emerged through a shift, from construing emotionality as essentially rooted in the body, to understanding it as relational in its origins and effects. Psychiatric social work and therapeutic communities appear to be the earliest and most influential areas engaged in this re-conceptualisation of emotionality. This study will examine how activity in these two areas contributed to the emergence, development and influence of the new model of subjectivity. It will develop three inter-related case studies. Each will examine the interaction of practice and theory over time, contextualising this with key social and political influences, and exploring the implications for thinking about the relation between psychiatric care and authority. Finally, the study will consider the challenge from anti-essentialist critiques of psychiatry that became prevalent from around the late 1970s and which contributed to the waning influence of the relational model.