John Rawlings Rees

John Rawlings Rees (1890-1969) was a wartime and civilian psychiatrist. He was director of the Tavistock Clinic from 1934, before his appointment as consultant psychiatrist to the British army, in 1939. From 1941 he visited Hitler's Deputy Rudolph Hess at the secret prison locations where he was held following his capture after landing in Scotland. In 1945, he was a member of the three-man British panel which assessed the capability of Rudolph Hess to stand trial for war crimes. Post-war, he became first president of the World Federation for Mental Health.

A controversial figure in the history of the original Tavistock Clinic, Rees has been accused by various commentators of setting up a world-wide network to undermine the values of Western civilisation [1] [2]. According to information from the current Tavistock and NHS Trust John Rawlings Rees was a doctor of the original staff of the Tavistock Clinic, became deputy-director in 1926, and full-director in 1933. He became a consulting psychiatrist to the British Army in 1938, medical doctor for Rudolf Hess since 1941 and founding president of the World Federation for Mental Health since 1948, which acts as a consultant to the United Nations. He played an important role as director of military psychiatry in the Second World War and many new ideas of group psychotherapy and institutional understanding came from the work of army psychiatrists, which were influential in the Clinic after the War. He died in 1969. The following quotes from Rees appear to confirm some of the allegations against him.

"We can therefore justifiably stress our particular point of view with regard to the proper development of the human psyche, even though our knowledge be incomplete. We must aim to make it permeate every educational activity in our national life…. We have made a useful attack upon a number of professions. The two easiest of them naturally are the teaching profession and the Church: the two most difficult are law and medicine." "Public life, politics and industry should all of them be within our sphere of influence…. If we are to infiltrate the professional and social activities of other people I think we must imitate the Totalitarians and organize some kind of fifth column activity! If better ideas on mental health are to progress and spread we, as the salesmen, must lose our identity… Let us all, therefore, very secretly be ‘fifth columnists.’"

Dr. John Rawlings Rees, "Strategic Planning for Mental Health", Mental Health, June 18, 1940 [3].

Rees has been linked to the Frankfurt school of Cultural Marxism via Kurt Lewin. According to a biography of Kurt Lewin written by Alfred J Marrow, "Kurt Lewin was the key link in the Frankfurt School/Tavistock migration to America."

Selected bibliography

• The Shaping of Psychiatry by War (1945)
• The Case of Rudolf Hess; A Problem in diagnosis and forensic psychiatry (1948), by John R. Rees, Henry Victor Dicks
• Hess, the Missing Years, 1987, by David Irving, Macmillan Press (many references indexed to Rees).

External links

• Mental Health, Education, and Social COntrol