Dr Lucy Brown

My research explores the influence of psychological concepts on popular understandings of healthy emotional life, emotional relationships and emotional expression in Britain from the 1950s to the 1970s. I am particularly interested in the history of attitudes to honesty, openness and self-disclosure. My PhD thesis entitled ‘Encountering Each Other: Love and Emotional Relationships between Men and Women in Britain, 1950s-1970s’ examined the overhauling of British models of marriage and personal relationships in the 1960s and 1970s towards an emphasis on transparency, generated by the popularisation of new psychological theories encouraging honest, authentic and spontaneous emotional expression. These included John Bowlby’s theory of ‘attachment’ and humanistic psychology’s theory of ‘encountering’.