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All psychotherapists should read this book. Indeed those whose reading is not confined to the International Journal of Psychoanalysis may well already have done so, since it consists of a collection of essays many of which have been published in the Listener, New Society and the New York Review of Books. We owe it to Rycroft and to his editor Peter Fuller to have seen that his huge output of reviews and other writings are far more than journalistic pieces and that, put together, they constitute a substantial, original, if idiosyncratic, contribution to psychotherapeutic thought.
In his introduction Fuller sets the tone by describing how he ‘began to consult Rycroft once a week as a patient myself. At the end of one session, he asked me whether I would be interested in editing a collection of essays, lectures and reviews. I had no hesitation in accepting this invitation’. Critics are bound by no inhibitions about self-revelation, but when we find an account by Rycroft of how he visited an analytic patient at her home when her father died, we hear him describe his own childhood, and reveal his intellectual contempt for aspects of the