Cultivating Relaxation in Twentieth-Century Britain. (360G-Wellcome-104411_Z_14_Z)

The project is a cultural history of the rise of relaxation therapy in twentieth-century Britain. It will analyse how relaxation teachings and ideologies have been created and assigned therapeutic value in specific socio- political contexts. The project will comprise three interconnected research strands, identifying how relaxation has been adapted and adopted by particular populations, and applied to particular health concerns. First, it will investigate the devising and application of relaxatio n techniques to transform experiences of childbirth in the interwar and postwar periods; second, it will explain how relaxation was made therapeutically relevant to the growing population of cardiac disease sufferers, especially due to its demonstrable ability to lower blood pressure; and third, it will analyse its proliferation to the general population from the 1960s as an increasingly commercialized collection of self-help methods for dealing with the stress of modernity. It will elucidate th e ways in which relaxation has been constructed as a clinical skill to be learnt and cultivated, and will examine its pedagogical material culture. By looking at how relaxation has been successively medicalized, professionalized and popularized, it aims to provide a comparative analysis for the growth of the contemporary Western, therapeutic mindfulness movement.