Insiders and Outsiders

I should say at the start that I have found it very difficult to write this paper. I have admired Dr Rycroft's writings for many years, but when I came to consider what his legacy to the psychoanalytic world has been and, therefore, what his place in that world had been and might have been, I had the sensation of stepping from a firm rock onto shifting sands. Partly, he had left the British Psychoanalytical Society before I began to train and, partly, the intellectual hegemony that he had reacted against was by that time in some disarray. So I have no personal recollection of him in the Society to guide me, and the landmarks by which he steered are not all recognizable to me. I knew Charles Rycroft hardly at all; I only began to meet him at the very end of his life. In that sense, I am an outsider to those at the Conference who did know him well, either as a friend or in that very odd and special way in which patients come to know their analysts.

The legacy of a psychoanalyst can have several aspects. For most analysts, their most important memorial is their work with their patients, and with their supervisees, if they have them. They may also be active members of their professional bodies, they may also work elsewhere, for example, in the National Health Service, and they may write, either for insiders, i.e. their fellow professionals, or for the general public. Some may write for both. It is for his writings that Dr Rycroft will be chiefly remembered - his writings, and for the fact that he resigned from the British Society but continued to work as a psychoanalyst. This affected the nature of his legacy in several ways.

After his resignation, his analysands could not formally become psychoanalysts. (This, incidentally, is an important hidden cost to the Society of the resignations of senior figures.) He chose to work in private practice, so that his work with analysands remains for the most part hidden and unknown. As Margaret Arden said, after he left the Society v