The ‘Parson’s Clinic’: Religion and Psychology at the Interwar Tavistock Clinic

2010; British Psychological Society; Volume: 12; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.53841/bpshpp.2010.12.2.11

ISSN

2396-8737

Autores

Alastair Lockhart,

Tópico(s)

American Constitutional Law and Politics

Resumo

Edward Mapother dismissed the Tavistock Clinic as the ‘Parson’s Clinic’, an epithet which has some, but no particular, basis in the personal and institutional strands linking the Clinic to Christian religiosity, though the Clinic’s association with religion as presented in mainstream newspapers may explain the nickname’s pertinence. The prima facie integration of psychology and religion that was achieved at the Clinic, however, went deeper than personal factors or media coverage suggest. It had a working theoretical basis in a metaphysical framework which was inherited from philosophical idealism (and personalism in particular) via the psychologies of James Ward, G.F. Stout and William McDougall. The Tavistock practitioners, notably Hugh Crichton-Miller and James Arthur Hadfield, achieved the integration of psychology with religion by using a specifiable metaphysical system as a mediating discourse.

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