The Way We Were: Romantic Assumptions of Pioneering Occupational Therapists in the United Kingdom

Abstract

This is the first in a series of three articles that explores occupational therapy's philosophical foundations in rationalism and Romanticism. The articles report the findings of a study that employed a history of ideas approach, which centres on the ideas people hold and how those change over time. The core idea in this study was that people's sense of themselves is expressed through the things that they have and use, a proposition that was explored in the context of occupational therapy as it was becoming established in the United Kingdom. The data comprised references to objects in occupational therapy texts and a precursor to the British journal published in England in the 25-year period between 1938 and 1962, which were analysed to identify the ways in which therapists thought about the things that they used in practice, along with those that they asked their patients to make.

This article focuses on occupational therapists' Romantic assumptions. It introduces the Romantics, together with their historical context and their ideas, and outlines how those ideas were transmitted to occupational therapy through the Arts and Crafts Movement. It then discusses occupational therapists' Romantic accounts of the tragedy of illness and disability, the dehumanising effects of industrial labour, the joy of crafting things by hand and the transformative potential of occupational therapy. Finally, the seeds of discontent with Romanticism that surfaced within the profession are identified.