It is more than fifty years ago now that I had a brush with the Tavistock. My five-year-old son, happy and confident during the day, was having night fears of such intensity that – guilt-ridden and fearful, as single mothers are wont to be – I sought help. And, where did one go for help? One went to the Tavistock: the Institute of Human Relations which, as it happened, was (and is) close by.
What a mistake that proved to be! I had come to ask for advice: things like whether I should get into bed with him or, maybe, set up a camp bed beside him, whether to use phenergan or . . . ? But, within no time at all, the doctor’s attention (for she was a doctor: of something, anyway) turned from him to me and was advising me to come to the Tavistock on a long-term basis not to talk about my child but to allay my own ‘deepest fears’.
When I told her that my ‘personal life’ was unusually happy and my ‘deepest fears’ would only prove to be about dying, and that I thought anyone not frightened of dying must be mad (I was awaiting the result of a biopsy at the time) her immediate response – I wrote it down at the time – was: ‘Ah! So you are frightened of going mad.’
One more visit and the psychobabble became intolerable. I never went back. As for the nightmares, they were treated with long readings aloud from the more soporific poets and soon came to an end.
It was hearing the other day about the goings-on on the Isle of Man – where, it is rumoured, eleven-year-olds are being alerted to sexual practices which, whether considered deviant or not, definitely rate an X certificate – that I remembered my experience at the Tavistock.
Who, I have been wondering, can have come up with this new curriculum which is being served up in some Isle of Man schools as part of the well-established and nationwide RSE (Relationship and Sex Education) programme, generally welcomed by parents and teachers alike?
My guess is that whoever provided the sensational new input will have the same skewed mindset as the practitioner at the Tavistock who deemed me – neurotic, certainly, but far from mad – a suitable case for treatment.