The Organizing of Psychoanalysis in Britain

Abstract

This paper describes the organizations that were the earliest attempts to establish psychoanalysis formally in Britain. This process of institutionalization occurred between the years 1910 and 1925. Interest flowered at times in the universities and in the progressive school movement. However these seem to have been more ephemeral developments. It was the clinical and professional interest which demanded the first and most long-lasting base. A complex process of interaction between a number of organizations occurred. Their memberships initially intermingled and overlapped until the British Psycho-Analytical Society was consolidated by the mid-1920s.