John Rawlings Rees

Who was John Rawlings Rees?

John Rawlings Rees OBE MD RAMC was a wartime and civilian psychiatrist. He was a member of the group of key figures at the original Tavistock Clinic and became its medical director from 1934. This group specialised in the new 'dynamic psychologies' of Sigmund Freud and his followers, and in particular the Object relations theory of Ronald Fairbairn and others. Recruited to the British Army during the second world war, he became an army Brigadier. According to Eric Trist, another key member of the original Tavistock group:

In 1941 a group of psychiatrists at the Tavistock Clinic saw that the right questions were asked in Parliament in order to secure the means to try new measures. As a result they were asked to join the Directorate of Army Psychiatry, and did so as a group.

After the war, the members of this group went on to found the Tavistock Institute, with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation. Later, many of them would occupy posts in international health organisations, with Rees himself becoming first President and Director of the World Federation for Mental Health which he founded, now a non-governmental organisation with formal consultative status to the United Nations.