Thomson's book should be read by all of those who want to understand better the often-repeated claim that the twentieth century saw the emergence of the psychological society. As the first sentence of his book makes clear, his project is to provide an understanding of how British people have come to understand themselves and others in what we regard as psychological terms. In doing so, he avoids producing a history that sees psychological ideas and techniques as being developed solely by an intellectual elite, who then handed them out to other professionals and ultimately imposed them on the unthinking public. Instead, Thomson examines how psychological thinking and practices were realized in more diverse locations and how they were frequently transformed and resisted. The result is a richly textured and finely judged history.

The first section of the book considers what Thomson terms the “Psychologies of the New Age” that formed during the first half of the twentieth century. What united these psychologies was an excitement about expanding psychological subjectivity. Such excitement manifested itself in several interconnected domains, which we are introduced to: Pelmanism, a popular system of mental training; the Psycho-Therapeutic Society, which encouraged all to believe that they could achieve mastery of mind over body; and, most interesting of all, Practical Psychology, a network of clubs and an associated magazine that promoted psychological knowledge for all. In all of these cases, people did not simply take the ideas of “Great Men,” accept them, and feed them to an accepting and grateful populace. Instead, ideas and practices were variously adopted, transformed, resisted, and supplemented. Moving from the popular to a more elitist group, Thomson discusses the eclectic psychological interests of members of the intelligentsia. Taking contributors to the modernist journal New Age as his focus, he shows how psychological ideas from East and West and ideas from inside and outside academia were seized upon and promoted by groups who transcended easy divisions among art, science, and medicine. Along the way, he highlights the neglected importance of the guru-disciple relationship in the promulgation of such ideas. What emerges is a complex picture of the diffusion of a set of psychological ideas and practices that were only loosely united.

One might conclude from this that Thomson's history is overly local. On the contrary, we are repeatedly shown how the psychologies that emerged were intimately connected to larger social and cultural changes. This is made still more obvious in part 2 of the book, which tackles domains where such connections can hardly be avoided: education, industrial life, and medicine. The place of psychology in these domains has received considerable attention, but, even so, Thomson has new things to offer. For example, on education he makes the seemingly obvious yet neglected point that histories have focused on psychology's part in the practice of mental testing while paying comparatively little attention to its role in pedagogical practices. While Thomson avoids getting drawn into a debate over which contributed most and how can one tell, his point is made. Repeatedly, the reader is given subtle, well-informed analyses showing how psychological ideas and practices infused school, working life, and illness, but these are also repeated cautions about just how great their impact was. For many, including psychologists, this speaks to familiar sources of unease: a sense that psychology is simultaneously both everywhere relevant and everywhere irrelevant and that it is both informative and uninformative. What this book does is to help us understand how these dilemmas and their associated ambivalence have emerged.

In the final third of the book, Thomson tackles the relationships between psychological subjectivity and social and democratic subjectivity as it developed during the Second World War and the following three decades. He focuses on two aspects in particular: the midcentury crisis and the emergence of the permissive society. True to the tone of the rest of the book, Thomson argues that psychology was not simply a reflection of existing values but also played a role in their constitution. The account of psychological individualism is excellent and highlights how people grappled with producing accounts of human nature that were incompatible with the extremes of fascism and communism. Thomson is rightly cautious about the success of the more ambitious psychological visions of the period, ones that promised the realization of a new subjectivity. Instead, he points out that as the war unfolded, psychology became less ambitious and more concerned with local projects. He goes on to illustrate the ways in which, after the war, humanistic psychology, feminism, antipsychiatry, and a new populism in psychology all contributed to the permissive society.

Thomson's book can be seen as an attempt to go beyond the notion of psychology as being seen solely as a technology of governance in the Western liberal democracies. His shift of focus away from technologies and his attention to historical detail are welcome. If I have one problem with the book, it is its comparative failure to tackle head-on what makes something “psychological.” In the areas that Thomson considers, such is the scope of its use that it almost seems to embrace anything that makes reference to human nature. Consequently, what is less clear is what was not psychological, and how so.

The stated ambition of this book is to open up new territory for those interested in the relations between psychological thought and practices on the one hand and key aspects of social and cultural change on the other. It has realized that ambition. The task for those interested in the relations among psychologies, wider culture, and modern subjectivity is to take up Thomson's challenge; there could be no better tribute to this fine book than to see a wave of projects emerge for which it becomes the touchstone.