Dicks’ List — Publications by Tavistock Staff from 1920-1970, Listed in “50 Years of the Tavistock Clinic” edited by HV Dicks

The Rockefeller Foundation’s website says it is the creator of the Tavistock Clinic (not the same as the Centre, in London, shown)

by Mary Maxwell

We try to ensure that GumshoeNews is not gloom and doom every day of the week. Granted, we mention a lot of bad things – horrors, to be exact – but in my opinion that is joyous news as it means the criminals have become identifiable. We can stop living under illusion.

I decided to buy what looked like one of the few copies available of H Dicks’ history of the Tavisock Clinic. It makes for very dry reading, but I see some investigatory merit in the bibliography.

The history is limited to the golden years 1920-1970 and so the bibliography does not, of course, cover what must be a vast amount of research into “mind control” or should I say “human control” that was published after 1970.

Or maybe that kind of stuff never made it into journals, as it is of the “classified” (read guilt-ridden) variety.

Even for these ones that made it (note, I abridged the list), the content of the articles may not reveal the full research reslts or the real purpose of the study.

It seem obvious to, me (from what I have learned outside this book) is that the many investigations into “maternal” bonding were aimed at learning how to BREAK THAT BOND. Fathom it, fathom it. Just fathom it. How to separate babies from their mother’s love.

Here is the list, for your perusal.

Ainsworth. M. 1952 “Psychodiagnostic assessment of a child after prolonged separation in early childhood. Brit. J. Med. Psych.

Alcock, A T. 1960 some personality characteristics of asthmatic children. Brit. J. Med. Psych.

Allen. C. 1936. Mental disease in general practice. Clinical J.

Allen. C. 1937.  Personality deviations in children, in E Miller, The Growing Child and Its Problems. Kegan Paul.

Allen. C. 1938. Adrenal dysfunction; its relation to sexuality.

Ambrose, J A. 1961. The concept of a critical period for development of social responsiveness. In B Foss, Determinants of Infant Behavior. Methuen.

Balint, M. 1966. A Study of Doctors. Tavistock Publications.

Balint. M. 1957. Training Medical Students in Psycho-therapy. Lancet.

Bannister, K. 1963. Marital interaction and its impact on the family, in J King, New Thinking for Changing Needs.

Bennett, Edward. (1928) Heredity and Environment, in E Erleigh, The Mind of the Growing Child.

Bennet, Edward. 1933. The psychopathology of sexual perversions. Proc Roy Soc Med.

Bion, W. 1946. Leaderless group project. Bull Menninger Clin.

Boreham, J. 1967. The prediction of suicide. Rorschach Newsletter.

Bott, E. 1956. A Study of ordinary families. Translated to German. Tubingen.

Bowlby, J. 1951.  Maternal Care and Mental Health, trans into many languages. WHO, Geneva.

Bowlby, J. 1958. Can I leave my baby? Nat Assoc for Mental Health.

Bowlby, J. 1963. Pathological mourning. J American Psycho-anal Ass.

Burns, C. 1930. The psychology of the criminal. Probation. 

Churchill, S. 1937. On Being a Mother. Gollancz.

Crookshank, F. 1929. Organ States and Emotional Cor-relates. Psych.

Dicks, H. 1950. In search of our proper ethic. [I’ll say!] Brit. J. Med. Psych.

Dicks, H. 1960. Some notes on Russian society.

Dicks, H. 1967. The proper study of mankind. Brit J Psychiat.

Emery, F and E Trist. 1963. The causal texture of organizational environments. French trans. Sociol du Travail.

Foss, B. 1961. Proceedings of a Tavistock Study Group on mother-infant interaction. Methuen.

Gordon, R. 1929. The physiological basis of repression and dissociation. J Neurol. Psychopath.

Gordon, R and R Norman. 1932. Some psychological experiments on mental defectives in relation to perceptual configuraions which may underlie speech.  Brit J Psych.

Heard, Dorothy. 1966. Anxiety in nurses and teachers. Maternal Health Care.

Higgins, R. 1966. The concept of maladjustment. Hum Relat.

[Human Relations is the journal of Tavistock.]

Wittkower, E. 1951. Eczema; a case study. Arch Derm Syph.

Woodhouse, D. 1961. Psychiatric influences in community services. In E Irvine, Ventures in Professional Cooperation.

Wright, M. 1931. Sociological factors which influence the suicide rate. Psyche.

Note: some of the publications from Dicks’ list are books. If you call them up at worldcat.org, you can see that they are carried at select universities — probably ones with staff working, overtly or covertly, for Tavistock.

Addition – Editor’s Note: Mary has just found a stunning biography of Henry Dicks at Wikipedia (CIA):

Henry Dicks was born at Pernau, Estonia (then in Russia) in 1900. His father was an English exporter and shipowner who also acted as British Vice-Counsul, and his mother came from an academic Baltic German family. He was educated at Pernau, Riga and St Petersburg, and he was able to speak English, Russian, and German fluently.

After serving as an interpreter with Military Intelligence with the British Expeditionary Force in North Russia, and then with the British Military Mission in South Russia and the Caucasus, he studied and medicine at St Bartholomew’s Hospital. In 1928 he joined the recently founded Tavistock Clinic, rising to become Assistant Medical Director there from 1934 to 1946 [well, you would, wouldn’t you].

In 1941 he joined the British Army as a Specialist Psychiatrist. Because of his ability to speak German, he was charged with medical care of Rudolf Hess in May–June 1941.[Well I’ll be chiggered!]

From 1942 to 1944 he advised Military Intelligence on German morale; from 1944 to 1945 he advised SHAEF on psychological warfare; and from 1945 to 1946 he advised the Control Commission for Germany on de-Nazification

[Who gets the Vatican passports type thing].

In 1946 Dicks was appointed the first Nuffield Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Leeds, but returned to the Tavistock in 1948, and remained there until 1965 as Deputy Director and Consultant Psychiatrist in charge of the Marital Unit [swearda God].

From 1966 to 1970 he was a Senior Research Officer at the Centre for Research in Collective Psychopathology, University of Sussex. In the late 1970s, he was the chair of the Campaign Against Psychiatric Abuse.

He studied the collective psychopathology of authoritarian regimes.

His papers are held at the Wellcome Library in London.

— Mary W Maxwell is sick of the whole damn thing.