The Psychiatric Family: Citizenship, Private Life, and Emotional Health in Welfare-State Britain, 1945-1979

During the decades following the Second World War, when Britain emerged as a post-imperial, post-industrial, democratic society, a new generation of psychiatrists successfully made the case that emotional health was forged in the monogamous nuclear family, and was the basis for social mobility, self-governance, and responsible citizenship. Departing from a focus on the individual's intrapsychic processes, clinicians became preoccupied with understanding the effects of the social environment---especially the impact of intimate interpersonal relationships---on emotional health. This dissertation investigates how this post-war revolution in psychiatry transformed British democratic welfare politics, linking social reconstruction and reform to citizens' private emotional and sexual lives in new ways. It argues that between 1945 and 1979 citizens' emotions came to be understood as the great social equalizer, and the nuclear family was cast as the privileged basis for stable democracy.;Through a series of interconnected case studies, this dissertation examines how numerous postwar mental health practitioners---including child psychiatrist John Bowlby, "therapeutic community" pioneer Thomas Main, psychoanalyst Enid Balint, and marital therapist Henry Dicks---developed practical methods for making new kinds of community-minded citizens within nuclear family environments. It considers why citizens' emotional welfare came to be a core interest of the British government, and why psychologically oriented relationship services were cast as a state responsibility in the postwar decades. It then tracks the unintended effects of Britain's state-supported family welfare service in producing new expectations of personal fulfillment and psychological freedom, and related forms of public political discourse in the 1960s and 70s. Clinical researchers, politicians, and the public alike sought to bring the law into conformity with citizens' private emotional needs (increasingly framed as citizens' rights). A range of political groups---including divorce reformers, feminists, and gay rights activists--mobilized psychiatric claims to introduce a wide range of social reforms that re-defined private life, including legislation pertaining to divorce, birth control, homosexuality, sexual consent, and family violence. My analysis reveals previously overlooked links between scientific experts, political activists, and tangible changes in public understandings and experiences of the relationship between public and private life.