MATHEW THOMSON. Psychological Subjects: Identity, Culture, and Health in Twentieth-Century Britain. New York: Oxford University Press. 2006. Pp. vi, 330. $110.00

Abstract

Historical writing on twentieth-century Britain has long privileged supposedly more “tangible” social, cultural, and political history over the mental and philosophical world of values, character, ideas, and psychology. It is from the perspective of this major existing historiographical imbalance that Mathew Thomson's highly illuminating book should be especially welcomed, because it is one of the very first to think big (and broadly) in asserting psychology's relevance to twentieth-century British history as a whole. Thus, while offering much to historians of academic psychology, the book's primary purpose and achievement is to provide valuable reading for all modern British historians by demonstrating how psychological ideas interacted with thinking and practice across British society and politics between 1900 and the mid-1970s. The book's three parts each house several chapters, the first part charting the range of early century psychological movements existing beyond the frequently noted Freudianism, the second psychology's role within education, industry, advertising, and medicine, and the third its interplay from the 1940s onward with war, social democracy, “permissiveness,” and feminism. Throughout, Thomson's analysis is subtle and multilayered. His treatment of feminists' responses to psychology from the early 1970s is an example, as he shows how the belief that psychology was an establishment force oppressing women through diagnoses of mental illness that ignored social causes of female unhappiness co-existed with a belief that therapy and talking could be powerful vehicles for feminist consciousness-raising.