Charles Rycroft and the Theme of Ablation

Although it is a pleasure for me to try to pay tribute to Charles's originality within psychoanalysis, it is, of course, sad that he could not be present to listen to the kind of heartfelt tributes that he fully deserved to hear while still alive. I knew him from 1965 until 1998, and I would guess that he was shy enough not to have appreciated his success as an independent thinker. We fell into a pattern of usually seeing each other at dinner whenever I happened to come over to London, but I have checked my files and there are also approximately 80 letters from Charles. On one of our last evenings together, he did remark that he felt his career as an analyst had been ‘ruined’ by the respective power of two women, Melanie Klein and Anna Freud. It is no doubt true that Charles's reputation and standing temporarily suffered from the complex politics of British psychoanalysis then, when ideological contests made it difficult for independent-minded people to win recognition. Although his A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis1 has become influential and sold well, a book like The Innocence of Dreams,2 even though admired by someone like Graham Greene, did not do as well in terms of sales as one might expect.

At the same time I think that it would be understandable if Charles underestimated his own achievement; even though books of essays and reviews3 cannot be expected to do well commercially, his work was, if only because of the impact of his publishing in The New York Review of Books, capable of being widely influential. Charles was like other early psychoanalytic pioneers in being broadly well educated and cultured. It seems to me that, in the face of the transitory fads and bureaucratic lethargy that afflict all fields, Charles did succeed in being a distinctive and original voice. Even though we no longer have the personal pleasure of Charles's intellect and person, I find there is no problem in bringing to mind some of his most characteristic ways of thinking.

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