In post-war Britain, psychoanalysts and psychiatrists attempted to apply their knowledge of human mental and emotional life to the world of work. In this paper, I discuss psychoanalytic studies of nursing conducted in three British hospitals (two psychiatric and one general) by the Tavistock Institute of Institute of Human Relations between 1956 and 1958. While previous efforts at organisational psychoanalysis and industrial psychology had focussed on the industrial workplace, these studies offered the chance to develop a psychological theory of caring labour. However, I argue that the attempted creation of scientific knowledge was undermined, not only by resistance from hospital staff and administrators but also by epistemological limits within the project of workplace psy-science itself. By cleaving to the overdetermined association between women and capacity for care, the researchers found it impossible to account for the abuse and neglect that was systemic within British psychiatric hospitals of the period. Despite the fact that newly-nationalised hospitals were reliant on migrant labour from Southern Europe, Ireland and the Commonwealth, researchers also refused to account for the role of race and migration status in the social relations of the hospital, centring the white nurse as the only appropriate subject of workplace psychoanalysis.

Grace Whorrall-Campbell is a historian of modern Britain, specialising in the histories of psy-science, sexuality, disability and labour. Before joining Corpus as the Michael Brock Junior Research Fellow in History, Grace was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for History of Science in Berlin. Recent publications include a history of occupational psychiatry and management at Roffey Park Rehabilitation Centre in History of the Human Sciences and a chapter on psychological job selection in Adulthood in Britain and the United States from 1350 to Generation Z (2025, University of London Press, ed. Maria Cannon and Laura Tisdall).