Psychoanalytic theory has never been produced in isolation. It develops through proximity — in supervision, in clinical discussion, in the sustained encounter between minds working on the same difficult problems.
In the early decades of the twentieth century the Bloomsbury Group — among them Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf and John Maynard Keynes — engaged seriously with the emerging science of psychoanalysis.
In 1920, the Tavistock Clinic was established in Tavistock Square. It became one of the world’s foremost centres of psychoanalytic thought and practice.
Psychoanalysis is the most fully elaborated theory of mind we have. At a moment when human beings are engineering synthetic minds for the first time, that body of knowledge carries a new and urgent weight.