Eric Trist - Biography

Biography

Trist was born in September 1909 (according to his autobiography), of a Cornish father and a Scottish mother. He grew up in Dover, England, where he experienced dramatic air raids in the first world war. He went to Cambridge University - Pembroke College in 1928, where he read English Literature, graduating with first-class honours. Influenced heavily by his don I. A. Richards he became interested in Psychology, Gestalt psychology, and Psychoanalysis, and went on to read psychology under professor Bartlett. At that time (1932/3) Trist has said he was very interested in articles by Kurt Lewin. When Kurt Lewin (who was Jewish) left Germany as Adolf Hitler came to power, he travelled to Israel via the USA, stopping off in England, where Trist briefly met him and showed him around Cambridge.

Trist graduated in Psychology in 1933, with a distinction, and went to Yale University in the USA and again met Lewin, who was at Cornell University and then Iowa. He visited B. F. Skinner, a key figure in Behaviourism in Boston. After witnessing some disturbing experiences during the Depression, he became politically interested for the first time, and read Karl Marx.

Returning to England in 1935, Trist met Oscar Oeser, who headed the psychology department at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, and went on to study unemployment in Dundee.

At the outbreak of the second world war Trist became a clinical psychologist at the Maudsley Hospital, London, treating war casualties from Dunkirk. He recalls how, in 1940, in the London blitz, "some very frightened people came out of their rooms, ran all over the grounds and we had to go and find them." The Maudsley, at Mill Hill, was a teaching hospital, and Trist attended seminars and met people from the Tavistock Clinic, whom he was keen to join. Opposed by his boss, Sir Aubrey Lewis, who wouldn't let him go, he joined the Tavistock group in the army, as a way of getting free, and was replaced by Hans Eysenck. Trist went to Edinburgh and worked on the war office selection boards (WOSB), with Jock Sutherland and Wilfred Bion. For the last two years of the war, Trist was chief psychologist to the civil resettlements units (CRUs) for repatriated prisoners of war, working to schemes devised by Tommy Wilson and Wilfred Bion. He described this as "probably the most exciting single experience of my professional life".

In July 1966, following the death of his first wife, and marriage to Beulah, Trist moved to America as Professor of Organizational Behavior and Social Ecology in the Graduate School of Business Administration at UCLA. In 1969 he joined Russel Ackoff in the Social Systems Science Program (S-cubed) at the Wharton School, the University of Pennsylvania. He taught there until 1978 when he became an emeritus professor. In that same year he joined the Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, Toronto where he initiated a program in future studies and taught there until 1983.

In the 1990s Trist wrote a three-volume account of the Tavistock, along with Hugh Murray and Fred Emery, The Social Engagement of Social Science. He died on 4 June 1993.