In postwar Britain, a group of psychoanalysts promised to improve how Britons worked. With their knowledge of how people related to each other, workers could be made to feel more connected to each other and their firm, while bosses would grow in sympathy and understanding. Work could be made more efficient and more humane, an attractive proposition in a nation seeking economic regeneration after war.

However, these experts largely failed. Psychoanalysis, when applied to the workplace, was hollowed out by more resilient, managerial ways of thinking about work. Workers, unions and managers treated psychoanalysts with suspicion, believing they could not properly understand the workplaces they’d descended upon to research. Psychoanalysis’s association with sexuality created significant difficulties in analysts’ efforts to create a science of work. Psychoanalysts’ promise to reimagine work along healthier, more democratic lines also faltered when it came to the treatment of racialised workers.

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