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The Imaginative Exile
In an age in which the field of mental health has been increasingly medicalized and standardized, genuine creativity and innovation in psychotherapy in general and psychoanalysis in particular, become correspondingly more rare—and vital.
Psychoanalysis is potentially one of the most creative, transformative and radical approaches to the curing of souls on the planet. But it has been beset, since its inception, by rigid allegiance to received theories and sectarian feuding, dogma and pathologization of dissidents, which compromise its healing potential and undermine its profound legacy (Rubin, 1998). The atmosphere for training, for example, has all-too-often been inimical to genuinely free and creative thought.
Analyst of the Imagination: The Life and Work of Charles Rycroft celebrates one of the seminal figures in 20th century British psychoanalysis, who serves as a beacon of intellectual independence, integrity and creativity, resistant to dogma and uncorrupted by narrow—and narcissistic—party politics. “My hope,” writes Jenny Pearson, the editor of this stimulating collection, a festschrift in honor of her late husband, “is that this book will help to open up a new readership for him [Charles]—not a following, which is the last thing he would want, but an open-minded readership of people who want encouragement to go on thinking their own way through the deeply liberating experience of psychotherapy” (p. 12).
Rycroft, author of A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis, Imagination and Reality, Rycroft on Analysis and Creativity, Viewpoints, Anxiety and Neurosis, Psychoanalysis and Beyond, and his personal favorite, The Innocence of Dreams, was an unusual and singular figure in psychoanalysis. Cultured and empathic, formidable and unpretentious, shy and tolerant of human frailty, Rycroft did not fit into conventional pigeonholes or allegiances. He deeply valued the Freud who found subtle meanings in the patient's communications, yet he challenged F