Burgess Brock Lecture 2025 - The factory on the couch: psychoanalysing work in mid twentieth-century Britain
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.

Please register for attendance both in-person and virtual.
Date: 19 November 2025, 17:30
Venue: Corpus Christi College, Merton Street OX1 4JF
Venue Details: Auditorium, and livestreamed
Speaker: Grace Whorrall-Campbell (Oxford)
Booking required?: Required
Booking url: https://www.ccc.ox.ac.uk/alumni/events-and-reunions/burgess-brock-lecture-2025
Audience: Members of the University only
Editor: Belinda Clark