Herbert Phillipson: 1911-1992

Herbert Phillipson, originator of the Object Relations Technique, was born in England on March 16, 1911, and was educated at Scunthorpe Grammar School and then Hull University College, where he studied primarily English and History. During the Second World War he served in the Royal Artillery Coastal Defence unit, subsequently with the rank of Major in the War Office Selection Board for officers. This group, which included T.A.T. author Henry Murray, to whom Phillipson would eventually dedicate his 1955 O.R.T. Manual, was revolutionary in introducing depth-psychological assessment into the field of personnel selection.

After the War, Herbert Phillipson joined Tavistock Clinic where he remained until his retirement in 1974 as Chief Psychologist, having been much involved with the establishment of the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations. An obituary by Harold Bridger in an English newspaper described him as a “key figure in [Tavistock’s] growing international reputation,” one “particularly remembered for developing successive cadres of talented young professionals.”

Like Hermann Rorschach before him, whose inkblot technique had its germinal seed in a certain “weird” dream, Herbert Phillipson’s concept for the O.R.T. itself came in one, very particular experience of the dynamics of human imagination. This occurred in 1948 while he was working with groups at Tavistock, as recounted by him in his original O.R.T. text:

In one group session it happened that on a small blackboard in the room there were three bits of doodling of varying degrees of ambiguity. The first seemed clearly to be five lines with a musical note upon it, the second two parallel lines going horizontally with two others going off at an angle underneath; the third some curved and angled lines which could be taken to represent parts of human figures. After about twenty minutes, during which there had been difficulty in finding any common theme, and many silences, a member of the group drew attention to these blackboard drawings, saying that he wondered what they all meant. Three or four other members immediately joined in, one saying that perhaps the room was used for some musical activity, another that perhaps it was used for teaching, and these were explanatory sketches for the pupil, and a third that it seemed to him that the lines at the bottom represented headless figures — it looked as if someone had been executed.

...Each individual member of the group was thus able to use the stimulus... to represent a phantasy which would resolve the particular kind of tension he or she was experiencing (pp. 10-12).

From this the young English psychologist would ultimately derive the vision for his ingenius series of O.R.T. Plates, their half-shown human figures “acceptable forms” (cf. Rorschach’s “chance forms”) for the expression of internal object relations:

A clear expression of these object relations will depend upon the possibilities inherent in the total situation of giving it form and meaning by reconciling the underlying structure of the personality with consciously acceptable forms (p. 22).

Herbert Phillipson died on August 30 of 1992 in England, survived by his wife Mildred and two adult children.

With publication of the O.R.T. by Tavistock Press in 1955, Herbert Phillipson gave psychology a superb instrument for the clinical and scientific investigation of human personality, one whose study and use over time seem only to further illuminate the great strength of its original conception. The current edition of the O.R.T. from the present publisher, which is the first new and complete edition since the original, is dedicated to the memory of this true and underrecognized psychology pioneer.