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This book contains a large number of articles which are mostly autobiographical, critical or psychoanalytic, written by the distinguished analyst and critic Charles Rycroft. There is also a rather lengthy introduction by Peter Fuller, who has edited the book.
The articles are grouped together under a variety of headings, ranging from ‘Psychoanalysis’ through ‘Beyond sex and sensation’ to ‘Religion and morals’. The headings are sometimes misleading. Thus while we find under the heading of ‘Psychoanalysis’ three articles of a rather general nature discussing the state of the art, only the remaining one is addressed to a specific issue in psychoanalysis: this is ‘Is Freudian symbolism a myth?’ Under the section on ‘Biography and autobiography’, together with two autobiographical articles, there are two clinical papers. Many of these are selected from the vast number of critical articles Rycroft has produced over the years in a variety of journals, including The Observer, New Society and the New York Review of Books. Mixed in with these are a few highly personal articles of an autobiographical nature which might be referred to as Rycroftiana.
The lazy but curious reader will be drawn to these last articles before tackling the others. I can particularly recommend ‘Memoirs of an old