The Trustees agreed to our making a survey of people, places, and organisations a core function of the new Archive and Study Centre at the beginning, in 1989, and in different forms it remained core to the work throughout the Archive's almost thirty years. The aim was to build up a guide and resources to support and encourage research, and to increase awareness among everyone involved in work with vulnerable people past and present of the value of the records, increasing the chances that they would be preserved.
This is the note I drew up to distribute to publications like Young Minds and Therapeutic Communities announcing the new Archive and its Survey. My youth in an historical sense is evident in attributing the coining of "therapeutic community" to Maxwell Jones, and the wide and innocent horizon open ahead of the Archive.
The announcement led to a major piece of work with and for Josephine Lomax-Simpson, for whom I organised and listed in situ the archives of the Messenger House Trust. These later came to the Archive and Study Centre, with much else; but at the time reflected, without my then knowing it, a traumatic ending, and occupied a floor in a house around the corner and up the road from her own which I had entirely to myself over many dispersed days; punctuated, in memory, by lunches at hers, and the beginning of a series of recorded interviews with Dr. Lomax-Simpson and her assistant, Audrey Beaton. At one meal the wear-pattern on the heirloom dining room chairs was brought to my attention; the answer to which - it reflected the discipline of well-brought-up women of an earlier age, whose backs did not touch the wood - repaid my attention to past experience, and seemed to cement something in our relationship.
Notes on PETT Archive and Survey Project
The Planned Environment Therapy Trust was established by Marjorie Franklin in 1966, "To investigate and study, publish results and expositions and train workers and carry out in practice methods of treatment of emotionally disturbed, maladjusted or delinquent children, young persons or adults, by means of planned environment therapy, especially in association with specialist psychotherapy." David Wills played a formative role in the activities of the Trust.
Franklin had coined the term "planned environment therapy" in the late 1930s to describe work at Hawkspur Camp, a permanent residential therapeutic camp for delinquent and disturbed young men led by psychiatric social worker David Wills. Franklin, born in 1887, trained as a teacher, as a doctor, as a psychiatrist, and as a psychoanalyst, studying under Ferenczi in Budapest. She was a fellow of the British Psychological Society, a member of the Howard League Committee for over forty years, and on the Council of the Institute for the Scientific Treatment of Delinquency from its inception in the 1930s until her death in 1975.
David Wills, who was apparently the first Englishman trained as a psychiatric social worker in New York in the 1920s, carried out pioneer work with disturbed, deprived and delinquent children in what would now be called, following Maxwell Jones' coining of the term for his work with psychiatric patients at the Henderson Hospital, "therapeutic communities". The essence of Wills' concept of "planned environment therapy" has been summarised as:
1. Shared responsibility between workers and clients, in a climate of living which frees the sharers to 'be themselves' and creates one unitary community rather than two separate ones;
2. The application of psychodynamic techniques to a residential setting, with special emphasis on the appropriate use of transference and counter-transference;
3. The character and integrity of the practitioner, whose necessary involvement with the client makes him peculiarly vulnerable to pressures for identification or collusion with the client's inner chaos or disorder. The adjective 'planned' in this model, qualifies the noun 'therapy' rather than 'environment'. The process of therapy is seen to take place primarily in the interchange between individual worker and individual resident, and aims at developing insight and increasing ego-control through making conscious the origin of unconscious conflicts, and necessarily relies on a fairly high degree of verbal and conceptual ability in the resident.
This concept has been compared with that of "milieu therapy", as expressed in the work of Bruno Bettelheim at the Orthogenic School in Chicago, and with the work of, for example, Maxwell Jones, and it would be generally felt that the term "planned environment therapy" includes this work.
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The Planned Environment Therapy Trust has agreed to use a bequest by the late David Wills to build a small archive and study centre. It has also agreed in principle to make it possible to carry out a survey on the location, contents, state, and accessibility of papers of persons and institutions in this country whose work would fall under the rubric of planned environment therapy, and of residential work with emotionally disturbed, deprived and delinquent persons generally. The aim of the latter would be essentially to facilitate research by compiling a guide, although one would also hope that by drawing attention to the interest of such papers more would be preserved, and more would find their way into archival holdings where they could be safely held, protected, and made available in a responsible way to researchers.
I would be very grateful to discuss the issues and methods involved both in establishing an archive, including the physical plant, and the survey. I would find it useful to discuss the issues of confidentiality and accessibility, and the legal ramifications of work with what are, in many instances, highly sensitive documents.
My doctorate, which involved extensive historical, archival and ethnological work on a living English town, and my seven years as a member of the therapeutic team in one of the residential therapeutic communities which have developed from the work of pioneers such as David Wills, prepares me for some aspects of the work in hand. I have informed myself on archival methods, construction and organisation, but do not pretend to be an archivist. But having been cast in that role, I would like to come as close to getting it right as possible.
-Craig Fees
