After reading Freud, W.H. R. Rivers, army psychiatrist at the Craiglockhart War Hospital, Edinburgh, begins using the ‘talking cure’ to treat shell-shocked patients. His most famous patient, the poet Siegfried Sassoon, will become one of the most famous cases in the history of psychoanalysis in Britain, as well as an archetype of the WWI shell-shocked soldier.

Image: Original manuscript of Sassoon's poem "Dulce et Decorum Est" 

After the First World War, several British analysts move to the major psychoanalytic centres in Vienna, Budapest and Berlin to be trained by the preeminent analysts of the period, including Sigmund Freud, Sándor Ferenczi and Karl Abraham. Joan Riviere travels to Vienna to be analysed by Freud. Riviere, who has already translated several of Freud's works before meeting him, goes on to become a major translator of his work into English. She also edits the first Collected Papers of Freud in English, published in 1924.

Picture: Joan Riviere

The International Psycho-Analytical Library is set up in collaboration with Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press. This is a major example of the 1920s Bloomsbury set’s growing interest in psychoanalysis. 

Photo: Karin Stephen and the Woolfs

The first Training Committee of the Society includes Ernest Jones, James Glover, John Rickman, J C Flugel and Douglas Bryan. Formal training will start the following year.

After a long battle, led by Jones and Edward Glover, the British Medical Association (BMA) recognizes psychoanalysis as a 'serious branch of science'.

Photo: 1927 letter from BMA re: investigation into psychoanalysis. 

Grace Pailthorpe and Edward Glover set up the Association for the Scientific Treatment of Criminals, soon renamed the Institute for the Scientific Study and Treatment of Delinquency (ISTD). Early members include Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and Otto Rank, and numerous psychoanalysts, such as Marjorie Franklin and Melitta Schmideberg, go on to work for the ISTD. 

Photo: Front page of a report by Glover of First 5 years of ISTD.

On 30th January Adolf Hitler is appointed German Chancellor.

In London, the Portman Clinic is formed by the ISTD, with the purpose of treating delinquent and criminal patients using psychoanalytic psychotherapy.

Between 1934-6: 

A series of exchange lectures between Vienna and London take place, in an attempt to bridge theoretical disagreements. In 1935, Jones lectures in Vienna and Robert Waelder does the same in London. In 1936 Joan Riviere also gives a paper in Vienna, ‘On the genesis of psychical conflict in earliest infancy’, in honour of Sigmund Freud’s 80th birthday.