The Intimate State: How Emotional Life Became Political in Welfare-State Britain

The Intimate State explores how state-supported mental health initiatives made emotional intimacy both politically valued and personally desired during a crucial period of modern British psychiatric and cultural history. Focusing on the transformative decades following World War II, Teri Chettiar narrates the surprising story of how individual emotional wellbeing became conflated with inclusive democracy and subsequently prioritized in the eyes of scientists, politicians, and ordinary citizens. This new model of emotional health promoted nuclear families and monogamous marriage relationships as fundamental for individual and political stability and fostered unexpected collaborations between British mental health professionals and social reformers who sought to resolve the Cold War crisis in political and moral values. However, this model also generated backlash and resistance from communities who were excluded from its vision of idealized intimacy, including women, queer people, and adolescents. Ultimately, these communities would foster a new generation of activists who would turn the state agenda on its head by demanding political recognition for marginalized citizens on the basis of emotional health. Through new archival research, The Intimate State traces the rise of a modern psychiatric view of the importance of intimate relationships and the resultant political culture that continues to inform identity politics--and the politics of social equality--to this day.

Table of Contents:
Introduction - Making Relational People: The Politics of Emotional Life in Post-1945 Britain Part I: The Welfare State's Intimate Places and People Chapter 1 - Democracy as Therapy: Psychiatry and the Social Environment in Interwar and Wartime Britain Chapter 2 - The Welfare State Begins at Home: "Deprived" Children and Britain's Future After the War Chapter 3 - Problem Mothers: Maternal Neglect, Mental Illness, and the Fragility of Female Maturity Chapter 4 - "More than a Contract": Marriage Welfare Services and the Politics of Intimacy Part II: Sexual Revolution and Intimacy Reimagined Chapter 5 - Pursuing Connection: Queer Romance and Friendship During Britain's Sexual Revolution Chapter 6 - Inherently Unstable: Adolescent Sexuality at the Boundary of Private Life Chapter 7 - "Home Is for Many a Very Violent Place": Healing from Family Violence in 1970s Britain Epilogue - Intimacy in the Age of the Individual Bibliography

About the Author :
Teri Chettiar is Assistant Professor in the History Department at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is a historian of the mind and human sciences whose work addresses the relationships between mental health, social and political reform movements, and gender and sexual identities.

Review :
Teri Chettiar's astute and well-crafted book tells the story of precisely how the personal became political in modern Britain. She charts the ways in which a diverse cast of players insisted on the primacy of emotional intimacy as a key component of modern wellbeing. Crucially, Chettiar shows how this ideal was adopted by queer people and others who were often excluded from the welfare state's vision of healthy citizenship. This insightful and fine-grained history explains much about contemporary attachments to the idea that states should secure our collective emotional security (as well as their persistent failures to do so). This fascinating book revisits the history of 20th-century Britain through the lens of intimacy. As Teri Chettiar convincingly shows, the personal was literally political for British psychiatrists, therapists, and social and sexual activists who argued that better mental and emotional health would lead to more successful and well-adjusted citizens. Thoroughly researched and beautifully narrated, The Intimate State is a must-read for scholars of British history and for anyone interested in the ways in which the intimate has served as a basis to imagine and articulate politics more broadly. We associate the phrase 'the personal is political' with second wave feminism, but this revelatory book shows how the most intimate aspects of private life were assimilated into state policy by successive postwar British governments. After 1945, when the psychological investigation of authoritarian tendencies tried to explain what had happened in Nazi Germany, family intimacy, parental care, same-sex desire, adolescent sexuality, and domestic violence all became concerns of the Keynesian welfare state. Teri Chettiar's lucid, subtle, deeply-researched analysis demonstrates the extent to which the aims and philosophies of later liberation movements were anticipated by policy objectives and social-welfare interventions based on an understanding of humans as predominantly relational beings. Twentieth-century British cultural history will never look the same again. We tend to associate Britain's postwar welfare state with social security and universal health and education benefits. Teri Chettiar's persuasive counter-intuitive argument is that emotional well-being and care were also at its heart. But these goods were themselves associated very closely with the conventional nuclear family. So Chettiar tells us something important not only about the welfare state but also about its unravelling as that conventional family lost its sanctity and centrality. This book by Chettiar... is an excellent addition to all university libraries.