Charles Rycroft

With the death of Dr Charles Rycroft at the age of 84, British psychoanalysis has lost both one of its most lucid exponents and its severest critics.

Rycroft was born in 1914 into what he liked to describe as the ‘lower upper classes’. His father was a fox-hunting baronet, who died when Charles was 11, leaving his mother depressed and relatively impoverished. The young Rycroft was sent to Wellington, where he joined a group of ‘type B Wellingtonians’, which included the poet Gavin Ewart, a lifelong friend. Although destined for an army career, he chose instead Cambridge where his intellectual gifts and left-wing sympathies were soon apparent. He briefly joined the Communist party, and, influenced by Virginia Woolf's brother Adrian Steven, became interested in what was at that time the subversive discipline of psychoanalysis.

After a year as a history research student, he applied for analytic training, but, by his own account, was considered by Ernest Jones, the doyen of the British psychoanalytic society, to be a dilettante, and so was asked to qualify in medicine first. His medical training was at University College Hospital, and later he worked briefly in psychiatry at the Maudsley Hospital, before setting up in private practice as an analyst in 1948, continuing to see patients until a few days before his death.

His first analyst was Ella Sharpe, who may have stimulated his interested in metaphor. After her premature death he was treated by Sylvia Payne (he used to joke about the ‘sharps’ and ‘pains’ of analytic training), and rose quickly in the British Psycho-Analytical Society, becoming assistant editor of the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, Scientific Secretary, and a training analyst, with R.D. Laing perhaps his best-known analysand. Towards the end of the 1950s however, he became dismayed by the rivalry between the Kleinian and Freudian factions, and began to question the scientific credentials of psychoanalysis. He quietly withdrew from the psychoana