Chapter 7 ‘Childish, adolescent and recherché’: Psychoanalysis and maturity in psychological selection boards, c.1940s–60s¹

The selection boards

All three boards replaced the traditional biographical interview with a multi-day psychological selection process. Candidates now faced questionnaires about their life and family history, intelligence tests, psychological projective tests, group discussions, job simulation tasks and, in the case of the War Office Boards, an obstacle task and a psychiatric interview.

The psychoanalysts responsible for the boards were associated with the Tavistock Clinic in London, the premier centre for psychodynamic psychiatry in Britain. The boards were later supervised by the Tavistock Clinic’s sister organisation, the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, founded in 1947 to pursue socio-psychiatric research.⁷ The psychotherapist Hugh Crichton-Miller opened the Tavistock Clinic in 1920 to continue in peacetime the treatment he had provided at hospitals for shellshocked soldiers during the war. The historian of military psychiatry Ben Shephard described the Tavistock as ‘the struggling poor relation of psychological medicine … where the old Great War traditions of psychotherapy co-existed with a mild, British form of Freud’.⁸ While Freud’s theories of infant sexuality were treated with suspicion and fear in Britain, psychoanalysis exerted a clear, if eclectic, influence across British medical and popular culture.⁹ Psychoanalysts’ influence was only to increase during World War II, boosted by refugee analysts fleeing antisemitic persecution on the continent and the discipline’s capacity to provide solutions to the problems of civilian stress and population mobilisation during total war.¹⁰

Maturity and leadership

Assessors labelled as immature candidates who were not fit to be army officers, civil servants or managers. Immaturity seems to have a simple negative relationship to leadership: but what exactly did board members mean when they dismissed candidates for being immature? One unsuccessful candidate for the civil service was rejected on the basis of being ‘A bit immature – in fact very young and raw and inclined to be supercilious.’¹¹ Staff on the Civil Service Selection Board therefore understood immaturity to be connected both to inexperience and to the improper performance of superiority.

The candidate’s haughtiness ruled him out as a plausible leader. Selection boards were interested in candidates’ maturity because seniority legitimated authority. The young men, and in the civil service and Unilever boards occasionally women, were in their late teens and early twenties. They were young adults, newcomers to the world of work. However, they were being chosen for senior leadership positions. Success in the War Office boards would earn a young man an officer commission; those who passed the civil service boards were appointed as senior administrators; and the Unilever scheme was designed to select people who would be at upper management level by their mid-thirties.¹² Successful candidates would therefore be expected to manage people older than themselves. Disrupting the naturalised hierarchy of age required authority to be legitimated via different means. Candidates were therefore required to don a seniority that was appropriate for their position, regardless of their chronological age.

Maturity was valued not just because it gave candidates an internal aptitude for leadership. Maturity was also a visual, superficial quality that existed in how that person was perceived. Tavistock psychoanalysts instructed Unilever selectors to pay attention to candidates’ physical maturity. Board members were asked to comment on whether candidates looked ‘older than [their] years’, a positive attribute, or ‘boyish’, to be marked negatively.¹³ Maturity rested on an understanding of the workplace as a social system, where it mattered that leaders were perceived as having a plausible claim to authority.

Because the selection boards chose candidates who they assumed would be more readily accepted as leaders within the workplace, they necessarily conformed to a conservative model of leadership. This undercut their claims that psychological selection was a more democratic way of choosing leaders. Psychological tests of personality and aptitude were apparently ‘not concerned with distinctions of rank or social status’ and were therefore ‘more democratic’ than the traditional system of selection via interview and personal recommendation.¹⁴ Nevertheless, psychological selection retained the old biases.

The postwar boards made less progress towards democratisation than the War Office boards. The unprecedented expansion of the armed forces as a result of conscription necessitated recruiting officers from a broader social base than the traditional officer class.¹⁵ However, in peacetime, the civil service and Unilever’s practice of only considering applications from university graduates, in the decade before the expansion of higher education, weakened their supposed commitment to democratic selection.¹⁶ Moreover, the army desperately needed officers, meaning that even candidates who were graded ‘doubtful’ were still passed by the board; the civil service and Unilever could afford to be more exclusive.¹⁷

Maturity and sexuality

For the psychoanalysts on selection boards, homosexuality indicated an immature personality that rendered one unfit for leadership positions. The psychoanalytic theory of psychosexual development, originating with Freud but remaining popular into the mid-century, held that homosexuality was a condition of arrested development, the result of an infant becoming stuck, or fixated, at one of the earlier stages of psychic evolution.¹⁸ Homosexuality was therefore evidence of psychopathology, and psychological experts argued they needed to screen against this form of mental instability. The psychiatrist John Bowlby, best known for his postwar work on attachment theory, warned the Royal Army Medical Corps that certain ‘characteristics’ indicated ‘Mental Defect or Temperamental Instability’ among recruits. Alongside men who exhibited nervousness, depression or ‘stupidity’, Bowlby also listed ‘feminine types and confirmed homosexuals’ as men who were especially likely to ‘break down in the face of action’.¹⁹ Bowlby placed homosexual men alongside ‘bedwetters’ as examples of undesirable candidates, demonstrating the link in psychoanalysts’ minds between deviant sexuality, immaturity and psychic trouble.

War Office board psychoanalysts therefore took an interest in candidates’ sexualities. As part of the officer selection process, men were given a series of psychological tests called ‘personality pointers’. The pointers were used to filter out candidates with ‘dull’ or ‘immature’ personalities.²⁰ One such test was the Thematic Apperception Test, in which candidates were presented with a series of images and invited to write a short story based on the illustration. The images were adapted by board psychologists from the clinical version of the test, created by American psychologists Henry A. Murray and Christiana Morgan.²¹ Images were selected to show ‘an undefined social situation’, onto which the candidate could ‘project his own dominant phantasies’.²² One illustration depicted two sets of hands, belonging to an elderly man and a younger man, supposed to be around the same age as the candidates.²³ The image was designed to reveal candidates’ attitude towards authority and leadership. In doing so, it connected authority to age, underscoring the fragility of the young candidates’ claims to the leadership role.

The Thematic Apperception Test was also intended to expose deviant or morbid sexual tendencies. One slide, designed to draw out oedipal conflicts, depicted an older woman standing behind a man around the same age as the candidates.²⁴ Another showed a young man standing fully clothed with his back to a young woman lying supine in bed, the covers sitting just under her exposed breasts.²⁵ The Thematic Apperception Test, administered at both the War Office and civil servant boards, was intended to weed out candidates who displayed an immature sexuality.

Probing candidates’ sexuality could take a very direct form. One candidate recounted his success at a War Office board in a letter to his sweetheart. Richard Williams described the luxurious surroundings of the board, hosted at Brockham Park in Surrey. The men gawped at the Monets, Cezannes and Manets still hanging on the walls (‘Some of the nudes shook us … All excused like strip-tease, under “ART”’). This was not the only salacious aspect of the boards Williams shared with his beloved. His psychiatric interview started with the shocking question, ‘How many women have you slept with?’ Williams reassured his girlfriend that he was horrified by the line of questioning, calling the experience ‘rotten’.²⁶

For psychoanalysts, sexuality was key evidence of an immature personality. However, psychiatric attempts to make candidates’ sexualities knowable chafed against the wishes of the non-psychological staff. For them, it was more important that selection boards adhered to norms of privacy and respectability. The mere presence of psychoanalysts, with their alarming associations with madness, sexuality and other taboos, threatened to undo the propriety of this project. The comments by MP for Westminster Abbey Harold Webbe at the 1946 Estates Committee, where Percival Waterfield explained his new scheme for selecting civil servants, represented a more colourful version of the widespread suspicion of psychoanalysts. Webbe ridiculed the selection board as

three days in a sort of glorified hotel with a ‘snooper’ behind every palm tree, and a man liable at every point to hop out and ask you: ‘How round is a cricket ball?’ … many of these people must finish up their three days thinking that they must really have been, by mistake, sent to a lunatic asylum.²⁷

Probing into candidates’ sex lives was therefore a scandal waiting to happen.

Psychiatric and non-psychiatric board members firmly disagreed on the appropriateness of enquiring into candidates’ sexual experiences. Psychoanalysts felt these questions were a natural element of their duties as ‘medical psychologists’ trained in ‘sensitivity to the graduations in personality’ from normal to abnormal.²⁸ However, non-psychiatric staff were squeamish about such prurient investigations. In 1943, the War Office forbade psychiatrists from asking candidates questions on sex and religion.²⁹ Later that year, psychiatrists were restricted to interviewing no more than 50 per cent of candidates, and in December 1946 they were completely removed from the boards. From then on, the psychological staff were represented only by psychologists employed to administer and interpret the intelligence and personality tests.³⁰ Irreconcilable tension over the place of sexuality in the boards resulted in the exclusion of the very experts who had devised the selection scheme. Psychoanalysts were also unwelcome in the civil service scheme: Waterfield saw from the scandal over psychoanalysts’ interest in sexuality in the War Office boards that they were not worth the ‘political storm’.³¹

Regardless of the psychiatrists’ exclusion, the link between maturity and candidates’ psychosexual development remained encoded in the personality pointers. The Civil Service Selection Board used adapted versions of the Thematic Apperception and Word Association Tests that were administered at the War Office boards. Even without the psychiatrists’ interview, where explicit questions about sexuality were asked, the meanings of maturity across these two boards remained consistently tied to theories of psychosexual development. The departure of the psychiatrists halted the development of new personality tests, fossilising the meaning of maturity within the Thematic Apperception and Word Association Tests.

The language of maturity allowed psychoanalytic theories of sexuality to be incorporated obliquely. For example, the Word Association Test could be used to assess candidates’ level of psychosexual development without direct questioning. First used by Carl Jung, the Word Association Test provided carefully selected words intended to reveal candidates’ phantasies. The quality of the candidate’s response indicated their maturity: a ‘mature’ candidate would be ‘able to express his emotions in an integrated fashion’ in contrast to ‘inhibited’ candidates.³² Moreover, word association was supposed to reveal desirable or problematic personality traits. The list of words testing ‘ego-centrism’ demonstrated an interest in homosexuality conceptualised as a pathological personality associated with narcissism, feebleness and emotional immaturity.³³ The test also asked candidates to respond to words such as ‘childhood’, ‘mother’ and ‘father’, stimuli to indicate candidates with unresolved oedipal complexes. The psychoanalytically designed tests scrutinised candidates’ psychosexual development, all the while couching their investigation in the more neutral language of maturity.

The concept of maturity did important work for psychoanalysts, who turned to euphemism to evaluate candidates’ psychosocial development. Maturity was a concept around which both the psychological and non-psychological selection board members could align. It sat at the boundary between the two groups, each bringing their own definitions to the term.³⁴ For the non-psychological staff, immaturity described an instinctive feeling that the candidate would not be able to plausibly wield authority in the workplace. The psychological staff invested the same term with the framework of psychosexual development that their fellow board members found so distasteful.

In the Unilever scheme, established in 1953, psychiatrists from the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations returned to job selection, working as specialist advisors on the board. The analysts continued to use maturity to exclude candidates who did not adhere to norms of respectable heterosexuality. The psychoanalysts instructed assessors to score the hobbies candidates included on their application form according to the level of maturity their interests demonstrated. Candidates who mentioned ‘childish, adolescent or recherché’ pastimes, such as ‘model railways, tiddly-winks, women, jiving [and] astronautics’ were marked down.³⁵ Selectors didn’t just disapprove of childish enthusiasm for trains, space travel and games, but also of racier playboy types. Adulthood was contrasted against both childhood naivete and adolescent sexuality. Unilever’s list of unacceptable interests also included ‘carving shepherds crooks, telling fortunes [and] Victorian gothic architecture’.³⁶ This list of peculiar hobbies (how many candidates actually spent their days carving shepherd’s crooks?) referenced a certain kind of queer fastidiousness and campy eccentricity. The bizarre list, which was seemingly a sly joke on the part of the psychoanalysts, enabled assessors to intuit what kind of man these hobbies implied. Assessors could therefore use their own discretion to exclude candidates without requiring gender nonconformity or sexual deviance to be any more than a spectre.

Maturity and emotions

The framework of maturity was used to refer to a candidate’s adherence to norms of masculine adulthood. As we have seen, this included respectable heterosexuality. It also included emotional control. Emotional restraint was an important social norm for both men and women in early to mid-twentieth-century Britain. Hera Cook has argued that the mid-twentieth century saw a strong insistence on emotional control, limiting acceptable emotional expression to ‘sensible and reasonable’ displays of feeling.³⁷ Although, as Deborah Youngs’s, Maria Cannon’s and Emily E. Robson’s chapters in this volume show, the association between adulthood and emotional control has a history stretching back to the Middle Ages, the expectation upon adults to exercise considerable emotional restraint began in the nineteenth century. Calls for emotional control intensified during World War II, during which time understatement and distaste for extremes became a prized part of the national character, in contrast to the mass displays of political fervour in Nazi Germany.³⁸ This was a culture of respectability, in which the expression of strong, and especially strongly negative, emotions violated the norm of privacy.

Emotional control remained important after the war. The ‘emotional politics’ of reconstruction Britain, as Claire Langhamer has chronicled, rested on the assumption that political and social stability stemmed from ‘the ability of each citizen to manage their own emotions’.³⁹ Although emotional reticence was an androgynous social norm, it had special importance for men. ‘Emotional reticence’, Sonya Rose argues, was ‘quintessentially masculine’. If women indulged in emotional outbursts, they were silly fools: if men failed to maintain a level head, they lost their manliness.⁴⁰ Martin Francis also identified ‘unflappability’ as one of the ‘dominant codes of masculine emotional culture’ in 1950s Britain.⁴¹ Self-possession was not only required in the task of postwar reconstruction, it also needed reasserting as a normatively masculine emotional style in the context of supposed threats to British masculinity, both in the figure of the homosexual and the racialised immigrant.⁴²

One assessor’s description of a young civil servant demonstrates the association between adulthood, masculinity and emotional control. The observer felt this young man was hindered by his ‘inexperience and comparative youth’, but also remarked approvingly that he ‘spoke like a man of thirty – balanced, sensible and with steady common-sense’.⁴³ Adulthood was, in this remark, associated with good judgement and emotional stability. Despite not having the wisdom of age, the candidate could at least conjure up the corresponding gravitas through his performance of emotional restraint.

Board members were more likely to find women lacking in maturity. As both Maria Cannon and Kristin Hay note in their chapters in this volume, women have frequently been excluded from markers of adulthood. One selector described a female civil servant as ‘markedly immature, gauche and lacking in confident judgement’.⁴⁴ Another young woman gave ‘the impression of never having quite grown up, although in fact she has fairly heavy domestic responsibilities which might have been expected to make her old beyond her years’.⁴⁵ Selection boards found it more difficult to understand women as mature. While male candidates could demonstrate experience in ‘man management’ through their time in National Service, women’s maturity was derived from their domestic responsibilities.⁴⁶ Unlike the inexperienced young man who still managed to speak with the ‘sensible’ authority of a thirty-year-old, women’s distance from conventional forms of authority prevented them from being read as plausible leaders. The civil service supported the inclusion of exceptional women into their ranks in the interests of democratisation. However, they simultaneously retained their commitment to a definition of maturity that positioned masculine adulthood as normative, sustaining the exclusion of those who were not contained within that gendered norm.

Emotional restraint not only marked hegemonic masculinity, it also indicated psychological normality. Screening for psychic stability was one of the primary goals of the selection boards, and the reason for the psychological presence in the first place. The War Office boards were created over concerns that the previous system of officer selection did not sufficiently guard against selecting men who would break down in the face of conflict, creating both inefficient leadership and a burden for on military pensions.⁴⁷ However, the two civilian selection schemes maintained the War Office’s interest in psychic resilience, even though civil servants and Unilever managers faced none of the psychological strain of war.

The enmeshed nature of maturity, masculine emotional restraint and psychological normality is evident in a psychiatric interview staged for the information film Personnel Selection in the British Army (1944). The film was part of a Ministry of Information series titled ‘Report from Britain’, which Arthur Elton, director of the Ministry’s Films Division, described as ‘prestige propaganda’ illustrating the ‘efficiency of the British war effort’. The series aimed to challenge the ‘deep-seated’ American impression that Britain was ‘inefficient’ and ‘muddl[ing] through’ by showcasing the modern psychological selection scheme to a specialist audience.⁴⁸ Although shot in documentary style, all of the candidates had already passed through the War Office boards and were simulating the process for the cameras.

Nevertheless, the film remains useful as evidence of how selectors assessed candidates’ personalities. In Personnel Selection, one young man was given a psychiatric interview after his responses in the Thematic Apperception Test raised concerns about his mental state. In the interview, the candidate disclosed that he had suffered from a recurring nightmare since he was a child. He described waking up in the middle of the night, not knowing ‘the least where I am’ in the darkness. This was accompanied by a claustrophobic feeling, as if he was ‘being entombed’.⁴⁹ In a discussion about the interview with the psychologist, the board psychiatrist noted that the candidate’s recurring nightmare demonstrated a ‘state of inner tension’ that he needed to ‘master’ before he could be considered ‘fully mature’.⁵⁰

The psychoanalyst’s call for the candidate to ‘master’ his nightmare revealed gendered emotional norms. The dream was a subconscious emotional leakage that the candidate needed to control in order to be considered a man, rather than a boy. The candidate’s disclosure of this recurring night terror got him graded poorly by the board; he barely scraped through on the lowest pass grade. The nightmare itself was only part of the problem. The psychoanalyst, reporting on the psychiatric interview to the rest of the board, described the candidate as ‘cooperative and naïve, disclosing nervous traits almost too readily’.⁵¹ Despite the context of the psychiatric interview, where honesty and cooperation might be expected, this candidate was penalised for displaying these qualities. Honesty instead looked childishly naïve if it led a candidate to disclose the more morbid parts of their personality, however normal the experience in the grand scheme of human emotion.

For psychoanalysts in particular, fear was associated with childhood.⁵² Tavistock analysts were familiar with Melanie Klein’s theory of early childhood as a time of intense anxiety, fears that the infant must learn to integrate as part of the process of healthy psychological development.⁵³ The fact that the candidate still experienced a nightmare which first occurred in childhood indicated his incomplete maturity. Although historians have held psychoanalysts responsible for a loosening of emotional restraint and a less moralising attitude towards negative emotions such as fear, this was not the case in the War Office boards.⁵⁴ The military psychiatrist approved of emotional control, seeing the candidate’s expression of fear through nightmares as a troubling sign of psychological immaturity.

Maturity and democracy

The war against Nazi Germany and its allies raised questions regarding the nature of leadership in a democratic society. Democracy was an animating principle in the War Office boards. Labour councillor Emrys Jones called for an egalitarian overhaul of selecting officers in light of the war, arguing that ‘the simple liberal proposition that men should have equal opportunities is one of the things we surely are fighting for against the German idea of the master class and the master race’.⁵⁵ Postwar reconstruction also sought to embed democracy in Britain as a bulwark against the re-emergence of fascism and the current threat of Communist authoritarianism. Moreover, as the postwar labour shortage put pressure on productivity and the power of the trade unions rose, management by consent became an increasingly important principle.

The immediate postwar decades were characterised by an expectation that to secure the peace, groups with differing interests needed to work together in pursuit of the common good.⁵⁶ The civil service and Unilever selection boards were imbued with this spirit: candidates were selected for their ability to lead by consent and to demonstrate a democratic, rather than dictatorial, authority. Maturity referenced this considerate and emotionally contained style of leadership. The Tavistock psychoanalysts hired by Unilever defined maturity in 1968 as ‘a combination of practical wisdom, of steady and socially acceptable emotional behaviour and of effective social techniques’.⁵⁷ Adulthood was defined by the ability to relate to others in a socially appropriate manner, which involved the avoidance of emotional extremes. Psychologists understood adulthood as the peak of an individual’s psychosocial development: when one could moderate one’s own selfish drives and instincts according to social norms and expectations.

The definition of maturity from 1968 stayed remarkably consistent with the meaning of the term two decades prior. In the War Office boards, too, candidates who failed to demonstrate ‘effective social techniques’ were penalised for being immature. One candidate was graded poorly by the board psychiatrist for his ‘pushing rather than constructive attitude to the group’.⁵⁸ Domineering men who were ‘individualist’ or had a ‘selfish streak’ were not praised by the boards.

Rather, the selection board was looking for candidates who made acceptable leaders within the group. The Leaderless Group discussion, where candidates had to select and debate a topic collectively with no input from the testers, and group physical tasks, such as getting a team of men over a barbed-wire fence, were designed to simulate a group setting in which the role of leader was not fixed, and ‘passe[d] easily from one [candidate] to the other’.⁵⁹ By allowing candidates to organically take turns as leaders of the group, the tests hoped to show not just which men had leadership abilities but, more importantly, which of the men were accepted as leaders by the group.

The Unilever selectors were also interested in whether candidates behaved well in a group. The interests that candidates listed on their application form were allocated a plus or minus score depending on the social quality they evidenced. Candidates were scored one point for a hobby that was ‘sound, creative, maturing’ and minus one for a ‘faulty interaction’ or an ‘immaturing’ interest.⁶⁰ The hobbies were not important in themselves. Instead, the boards considered whether candidates’ interests, and the way men spoke about them, showed mature or immature social interactions. The board psychologists considered there to be ‘no (or little) difference between a solitary … activity or a social one which is apparently viewed from a solitary standpoint’.⁶¹ Therefore, a candidate who wrote ‘I play tennis’ on his application form would only be awarded a point if he mentioned playing tennis with his friends. Solitary interests were only marked positively if they helped ‘mature the personality’. For instance, wood carving was deemed a suitably mature hobby because it taught problem-solving skills; although, as discussed earlier, apparently not if the candidate carved shepherd’s crooks.⁶²

Psychologists asked examiners to consider ‘what kind of relationship’ the candidate enjoyed with other participants in their interests. Assessors were required to take note of whether candidates displayed a ‘dependent’ or ‘aggressive’ relationship to others in the pursuit of their hobby.⁶³ Selectors were interested in candidates’ pastimes as a means to ascertain the quality of their social relationships. A mature candidate was one who demonstrated an easy sociability, who was amiable rather than authoritarian. An easy-going manner and a proclivity for groups, what the Civil Service Selection Board called ‘clubability [sic]’, were believed to constitute the ideal personality for leadership in a democratic society, in which the modern manager was supposed to attend to his subordinates’ wants and feelings.⁶⁴

Conclusion

Maturity remained a resilient concept, moving between military, public sector and private industry recruitment without much modification. Despite the psychiatrists’ ejection from War Office boards in 1946, the language of maturity remained encoded in the tests they left behind, tests that were adopted by the Civil Service Selection Board in 1945. The psychoanalysts returned to advise on the Unilever Companies Management Development Scheme in 1953. All three schemes lasted well into the twentieth century. Even today, the renamed Army Officer Selection Board assesses candidates using psychometric tests and similar group tasks to those devised in 1942. Despite reforms to civil service selection following the 1968 Fulton Report, the Civil Service Selection Board remained into the early twenty-first century. Aspiring civil servants in 2023 continue to take cognitive and personality tests. Although the language of maturity is obscured, successful candidates remain those who are able to make calm and intelligent decisions, exhibit leadership skills and cultivate appropriate social relations.⁶⁵ Tavistock psychoanalysts continued to work as consultants on the Unilever Management Development Scheme until at least the 1980s. Today, the Unilever Future Leaders Programme still tests candidates’ ‘cognitive, emotional, and social traits’.⁶⁶

All three schemes used psychoanalytic theories of personality development to sustain adulthood as a privileged state. Throughout the chapter, we’ve seen that board members more often described candidates as ‘immature’ than ‘mature’. The language of maturity was used as a means of exclusion, rejecting candidates who did not conform to psychosexual, emotional or social standards. Maturity was a resilient concept because it was capacious, capable of containing different meanings for the psychological and non-psychological staff. The non-psychological staff understood maturity as a common-sense requirement for successful applicants. For the young men and occasionally women to be plausible leaders, they needed to conduct themselves with the authority on which their young age provided a tenuous grip.

Maturity’s stability as a concept over time and across the three boards provides an object lesson in how dominant norms of adulthood are reproduced. Although the boards promised that scientific methods would democratise job selection, they failed to challenge dominant norms of adulthood that made some candidates appear readier for leadership positions than others. Paradoxically, the democratic impulse incentivised rewarding candidates who conformed to a conventional model of adult authority that was deemed acceptable by the group.

This chapter started with a game of pretend. The boards asked candidates to explore their imaginations, tackle obstacle courses and play at being an army officer, civil servant or manager. Despite, or more likely because of, this ‘house party’ atmosphere, the young people who passed through the boards were watched carefully for signs of juvenility that would disqualify them from the role.⁶⁷ The language of maturity was used to legitimate the authority that successful candidates would wield in the workplace. Psychoanalysts strengthened the longstanding association between adulthood and power by linking immaturity with a libidinal and anxious infant psyche. Psychoanalysts might have transformed the meanings of childhood in the twentieth century, but their work in job selection showed they retained a conservative model of the powers and privileges of adulthood.

Notes

1. 1. Research for this chapter was funded through an Oxford-Open-Cambridge AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership. Thank you also to Alice White for sharing her expertise on the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations.

2. 2. ‘Indoor Leaderless Group Situation’, RTC Information Bulletin No. 3, June 1943, SA/TIH/B/2/1/1/1/3, Tavistock Institute collection, Wellcome Library, London.

3. 3. John Stewart, ‘ “The Dangerous Age of Childhood”: Child Guidance and the “Normal” Child in Great Britain, 1920–1950’, Paedagogica Historica 47, no. 6 (December 2011): 785–803; Michal Shapira, The War Inside: Psychoanalysis, Total War, and the Making of the Democratic Modern Self in Postwar Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Mathew Thomson, Lost Freedom: The Landscape of the Child and the British Post-War Settlement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

4. 4. Thomson, Lost Freedom.

5. 5. Thomas Dixon, Weeping Britannia: Portrait of a Nation in Tears (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

6. 6. Teri Chettiar, ‘Democratizing Mental Health: Motherhood, Therapeutic Community and the Emergence of the Psychiatric Family at the Cassel Hospital in Post-Second World War Britain’, History of the Human Sciences 25, no. 5 (December 2012): 107–22.

7. 7. Henry Victor Dicks, Fifty Years of the Tavistock Clinic (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970).

8. 8. Ben Shephard, A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists in the Twentieth Century (London: Jonathan Cape, 2000), 168. It is true that the Tavistock Clinic was often overshadowed by its rival, the Maudsley, which had a more psychobiologic slant. Edgar Jones, Shahina Rahman, and Robin Woolven, ‘The Maudsley Hospital: Design and Strategic Direction, 1923–1939’, Medical History 51, no. 3 (2007): 357–78.

9. 9. Rhodri Hayward, ‘The Pursuit of Serenity: Psychological Knowledge and the Making of the British Welfare State’, in History and Psyche: Culture, Psychoanalysis, and the Past, ed. Sally Alexander and Barbara Taylor (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 283–304; Rhodri Hayward, The Transformation of the Psyche in British Primary Care, 1970–1970 (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014); Sarah Phelan, ‘A Commonsense Psychoanalysis: Listening to the Psychosocial Dreamer in Interwar Glasgow Psychiatry’, History of the Human Sciences 34, no. 3–4 (2021): 142–68; Dean Rapp, ‘The Early Discovery of Freud by the British General Educated Public, 1912–1919’, Social History of Medicine 3, no. 2 (1990): 217–43; Dean Rapp, ‘The Reception of Freud by the British Press: General Interest and Literary Magazines, 1920–1925’, Journal of the History of the Behavioural Sciences 24, no. 2 (1988): 191–201; Graham Richards, ‘Britain on the Couch: The Popularization of Psychoanalysis in Britain 1918–1940’, Science in Context 13, no. 2 (2000): 183–230.

10. 10. Shapira, The War Inside; Mathew Thomson, Psychological Subjects: Identity, Culture and Health in Twentieth Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 209.

11. 11. ‘Follow-Up Notes on Reconstruction Assistant Principals Administration Course at T.E. Division of H.M. Treasury’, 13–29 May 1944, CSC 5/394, Records of the Civil Service Commission, National Archives, Kew.

12. 12. ‘Unilever Companies Management Development Scheme: Notes for Selectors’, 1969, SA/TIH/B/2/9/9/7, Tavistock Institute collection, Wellcome Library, London.

13. 13. ‘Unilever Companies Management Development Scheme’.

14. 14. Personnel Selection in the British Army 1944: Officers, 1944; letter from John Pinsent to Percival Waterfield, 30 January [1946], CSC 5/394, Records of the Civil Service Commission, National Archives, Kew.

15. 15. Ben S. Morris, ‘Officer Selection in the British Army: 1942–1945’, Occupational Psychology 12, no. 4 (1949): 219–34.

16. 16. See chapter 5 of Peter Mandler, The Crisis of the Meritocracy: Britain’s Transition to Mass Education since the Second World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).

17. 17. Personnel Selection in the British Army 1944: Officers.

18. 18. Melanie Klein, The Psycho-Analysis of Children, trans. Alix Strachey, revised (London: Hogarth Press, 1975), 240; Paul Robinson, ‘Freud and Homosexuality’, in Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis, ed. Tim Dean and Christopher Lane (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 92; Jonathan Ned Katz, The Invention of Heterosexuality (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 72–4.

19. 19. Emma Vickers, Queen and Country: Same-Sex Desire in the British Armed Forces, 1939–45 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 122; notes on selection and diagnosis in the Armed Forces, 1942, PP/BOW/C.5/2/3, Papers of John Bowlby, Wellcome Library, London.

20. 20. Selection board notes on personality pointers, c.1942, SA/TIH/B/2/1/1/2/2, Tavistock Institute collection, Wellcome Library, London.

21. 21. Christiana D. Morgan and Henry A. Murray, ‘A Method for Investigating Fantasies: The Thematic Apperception Test’, Archives of Neurology & Psychiatry 34, no. 2 (1 August 1935): 289.

22. 22. Personnel Selection in the British Army 1944: Officers.

23. 23. Alice White, ‘From the Science of Selection to Psychologising Civvy Street: The Tavistock Group, 1939–1948’ (PhD thesis, University of Kent, 2016).

24. 24. White, ‘From the Science of Selection to Psychologising Civvy Street’, 98.

25. 25. White, ‘From the Science of Selection to Psychologising Civvy Street’, 99.

26. 26. Chotie Darling, ‘How Many Women Have You Slept With?’, 25 February 2013, www.chotiedarling.co.uk/my-blog/2013/02/how-many-women-have-you-slept-with-thursday-25th-february.html, accessed 17 July 2024.

27. 27. Richard A. Chapman, Leadership in the British Civil Service: A Study of Sir Percival Waterfield and the Creation of the Civil Service Selection Board (London: Croom Helm, 1984), 100.

28. 28. ‘Preliminary Technical Appreciation of the Problem of Selecting Higher Grade Civil Servants during the Reconstruction’, Eric Trist and J.D. Sutherland, 20 November 1944, CSC 5/397, Records of the Civil Service Commission, National Archives, Kew.

29. 29. Robert H. Ahrenfeldt, Psychiatry in the British Army in the Second World War (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958), 64.

30. 30. Ahrenfeldt, Psychiatry in the British Army in the Second World War, 67.

31. 31. Percival Waterfield’s notes following his meeting with Brigadier Buchanan Smith, 7 October 1944, CSC 5/397, Records of the Civil Service Commission, National Archives, Kew.

32. 32. Selection board notes on personality pointers.

33. 33. Elizabeth Lunbeck, ‘The Narcissistic Homosexual: Genealogy of a Myth’, in History and Psyche: Culture, Psychoanalysis, and the Past, ed. Sally Alexander and Barbara Taylor (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 49–67.

34. 34. Susan Leigh Star and James R. Griesemer, ‘Institutional Ecology, “Translations” and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907–1939’, Social Studies of Science 19, no. 3 (1998): 387–420; Susan Leigh Star, ‘The Structure of Ill-Structured Solutions: Boundary Objects and Heterogenous Distributed Problem Solving’, in Distributed Artificial Intelligence, ed. Les Gasser and Michael N. Huhns, vol. 2 (London: Pitman, 1989), 37–54; Susan Leigh Star, ‘This Is Not a Boundary Object: Reflections on the Origins of a Concept’, Science, Technology, & Human Values 35, no. 5 (2010): 601–17. For the application of Star’s concept to the War Office boards, see White, ‘From the Science of Selection to Psychologising Civvy Street’.

35. 35. ‘Criteria for the Second Section of the Recruitment and Screening Study’, 24 February 1960, SA/TIH/B/2/9/3/3, Tavistock Institute collection, Wellcome Library, London.

36. 36. ‘Criteria for the Second Section of the Recruitment and Screening Study’.

37. 37. Hera Cook, ‘From Controlling Emotion to Expressing Feelings in Mid-Twentieth-Century England’, Journal of Social History 47, no. 3 (1 March 2014): 628.

38. 38. Sonya Rose, Which People’s War? National Identity and Citizenship in Britain 1939–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

39. 39. Claire Langhamer, ‘An Archive of Feeling? Mass Observation and the Mid-Century Moment’, Insights 9, no. 4 (2016): 142.

40. 40. Rose, Which People’s War?, 157.

41. 41. Martin Francis, ‘Tears, Tantrums, and Bared Teeth: The Emotional Economy of Three Conservative Prime Ministers, 1951–1963’, Journal of British Studies 41, no. 3 (July 2002): 355.

42. 42. Francis, ‘Tears, Tantrums, and Bared Teeth’.

43. 43. ‘Follow-Up Notes on Assistant Principals on Course at T.E. Division of H.M. Treasury’, 7–24 August 1946, CSC/5 394, Records of the Civil Service Commission, National Archives, Kew.

44. 44. ‘Thumbnail Sketches of Failure in the Administrative Grade of the Civil Service’, January 1946, CSC 5/394, Records of the Civil Service Commission, National Archives, Kew.

45. 45. ‘Thumbnail Sketches of Failure in the Administrative Grade of the Civil Service’.

46. 46. On the importance of National Service to managers’ sense of themselves as leaders, see Michael Roper, Masculinity and the British Organisation Man since 1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 112.

47. 47. Shephard, A War of Nerves, 139–40.

48. 48. Edgar Jones, ‘Neuro Psychiatry 1943: The Role of Documentary Film in the Dissemination of Medical Knowledge and Promotion of the U.K. Psychiatric Profession’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 69, no. 2 (2014): 302.

49. 49. Personnel Selection in the British Army 1944: Officers.

50. 50. Personnel Selection in the British Army 1944: Officers.

51. 51. Personnel Selection in the British Army 1944: Officers.

52. 52. Stearns and Haggerty have argued that the influence of psychology and psychoanalysis in American child guidance literature from the 1920s to the mid-century emphasised fear as a childhood emotion that needed significant parental attention. Peter N. Stearns and Timothy Haggerty, ‘The Role of Fear: Transitions in American Emotional Standards for Children, 1850–1950’, The American Historical Review 96, no. 1 (1991): 63–94; Peter N. Stearns, American Fear: The Causes and Consequences of High Anxiety (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006). In Britain, Michal Shapira has also identified psychoanalysts’ influence in lay attitudes to fear, including the belief that adult anxieties were rooted in childhood fears. Shapira, The War Inside, 55, 57.

53. 53. Melanie Klein, Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works, 1921–1945 (London: Hogarth Press, 1975); Klein, The Psycho-Analysis of Children.

54. 54. Shapira, The War Inside, 35; Cook, ‘From Controlling Emotion to Expressing Feelings in Mid-Twentieth-Century England’.

55. 55. White, ‘From the Science of Selection to Psychologising Civvy Street’, 32.

56. 56. Ben Jackson, ‘Corporatism and Its Discontents: Pluralism, Anti-Pluralism and Anglo-American Industrial Relations, c. 1930–80’, in Modern Pluralism: Anglo-American Debates since 1880, ed. Mark Bevir (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 105–28; Daniel Ussishkin, ‘Morale and the Postwar Politics of Consensus’, Journal of British Studies 52, no. 3 (2013): 722–43.

57. 57. ‘Unilever Companies Management Development Scheme Notes on Screening’, 23 February 1968, SA/TIH/B/2/9/9/3, Tavistock Institute collection, Wellcome Library, London.

58. 58. Personnel Selection in the British Army 1944: Officers.

59. 59. Personnel Selection in the British Army 1944: Officers.

60. 60. ‘Notes on Assessment for the Unilever Companies Management Development Scheme’, c.1960, SA/TIH/B/2/9/3/3, Tavistock Institute collection, Wellcome Library, London.

61. 61. ‘Notes on Assessment for the Unilever Companies Management Development Scheme’.

62. 62. ‘Notes on Assessment for the Unilever Companies Management Development Scheme’.

63. 63. ‘Notes on Assessment for the Unilever Companies Management Development Scheme’.

64. 64. ‘Job Analysis’, 1944, CSC 5/394, Records of the Civil Service Commission, National Archives, Kew.

65. 65. ‘Preparing for the Civil Service Judgement Test’, Civil Service HR, 11 February 2022, www.gov.uk/guidance/preparing-for-the-civil-service-judgement-test; ‘Preparing for the Civil Service Work Strengths Test’, Cabinet Office, 9 June 2022, www.gov.uk/guidance/preparing-for-the-civil-service-work-strengths-test.

66. 66. ‘Unilever Future Leaders Programme’, Unilever UK, 2023, https://careers.unilever.com/unilever-future-leaders-programme, accessed 17 July 2024.

67. 67. Our Special Correspondent, ‘Qualities for a Civil Servant’, The Times (London), 24 May 1948, 2.

References