John Rawlings Rees

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John Rawlings Rees (also called Jack) (born June 25, 1890 in Leicester , † April 11, 1969 in London ) was a British psychiatrist and brigadier general in the British Army (Royal Army Medical Corps RAMC). He was Commander of the British Empire (CBE) and Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians .

Life

Rees was the son of a Wesleyan Methodist priest. He wanted to be a missionary first, but then studied medicine.

During the First World War he served in France, Mesopotamia and India. There he saw soldiers with nervous breakdowns who were inadequately treated.

His primary interest was public health. After meeting Hugh Crichton-Miller, who was influenced by the teachings of Carl Gustav Jung and Sigmund Freud , he turned to psychiatry. Chrichton founded the Tavistock Clinic in 1920 . Rees did a training analysis with the Jungian Morris Nicoll, but did not train as a psychoanalyst. In 1934 he followed Crichton-Miller as medical director at the Tavistock Clinic. Under his leadership, the clinic became the main center for psychoanalytic psychiatry in Great Britain.

In 1939 Rees was given command of the British Army Psychiatry. Since there were hardly any psychiatrists in the army, he put together a team from the Tavistock Clinic. By 1945, 300 army psychiatrists had been trained and Rees was promoted to brigadier general.

After the Second World War, the younger generation urged to use their wartime experience and to help psychoanalysis achieve a breakthrough in clinical work. Rees could not keep up with this development and resigned as director in 1947. In 1948 he organized the first Mental Health Congress, which led to the establishment of the World Federation for Mental Health, with Rees as its first president. In numerous trips to the Third World, he helped spread modern psychiatry.

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Rees promoted the new dynamic psychology such as psychoanalysis , individual psychology , analytical psychology as well as the British object relationship theory of William RD Fairbairn and the training in psychiatric social work and educational counseling at the Tavistock Clinic in the 1930s . His leading collaborators were James Arthur Hadfield and Ian Suttie. Their 1935 book The Origins of Love and Hate had an important influence in British psychotherapy, which was confirmed by both John Bowlby and Donald Winnicott . Other collaborators in the 1930s were Wilfred R. Bion , Henry V. Dicks, and Eric Lansdown Trist .

During World War II, Rees was able to convince the army of the value of psychiatry in selecting soldiers according to their personality and intelligence, in rehabilitating psychiatric victims, and in maintaining good morale.

The education and training of soldiers with limited intelligence was a major wartime innovation that paved the way for postwar developments in the field.

After the war, Rees worked with five employees under the name Operation Phoenix, the Interim Planning Committee (IPC). Under the chairmanship of Wilfred Bion, new ways of working on the Tavistock were formulated based on her war experience. This interdisciplinary group founded the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in 1947 and turned to questions of organizational development and social change.

literature

  • John Rawlings Rees: The health of the mind. Faber & Faber, London 1929; WW Norton, New York, 1951.
  • John Rawlings Rees: Three Years of Military Psychiatry in the United Kingdom. British Medical Journal, 1943.
  • John Rawlings Rees: A brief impression of British military psychiatry. Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic, 1944.
  • John Rawlings Rees: (1945). The shaping of psychiatry by war. New York: WW Norton, 1945.
  • James Arthur Hadfield, Ian Suttie: The Origins of Love and Hate, 1935
  • Henry V Dicks: Fifty Years of the Tavistock Clinic . Routledge 1970, ISBN 0710068468
  • Pearl HM King: Activities of British psychoanalysts during the Second World War and the influence of their interdisciplinary collaboration on the development of psychoanalysis in Great Britain. International Review of Psycho-Analysis, 1982
  • Eric L. Trist: The Social Engagement of Social Science: a Tavistock Anthology Vol 1 , Free Association Books, 1990, ISBN 0812281926

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A Brief History , World Federation for Mental Health website, accessed August 14, 2016.
  2. ^ Tavistock Institute
personal data
SURNAME Rees, John Rawlings
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Rees, Jack
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British psychiatrist
DATE OF BIRTH June 25, 1890
PLACE OF BIRTH Leicester
DATE OF DEATH April 11, 1969
Place of death London