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To review Charles Rycroft's new book offered an opportunity to solve the conundrum of why he had resigned, or withdrawn, from the British Psycho-Analytical Society. Indeed the introduction asks the same question: 'Why did he take this option?' I had long admired the clarity and style of Rycroft's writings and recently regretted and puzzled over his withdrawal; yet I emerged from reading this volume no wiser as to the real reason for his resignation.
There are 25 pieces in the book, most of them previously published reviews and essays, but several previously unpublished pieces; notably an essay 'Psychoanalysis and beyond' (Ch. 10) which gives the whole book its title and traces Rycroft's intellectual psychoanalytical autobiography; a more personal autobiographical sketch 'Where I came from' (Ch. 20) tracing his early family origins and relationships; and Ch. 22 on 'Ablation of the parental images' which he tells us was refused by the editors of this journal when first submitted in 1965.
The book reviews are divided into two sections: 'Freudiana' containing notices of books mostly by non-psychoanalysts, several first published in the New York Review of Books; and then a section 'Psychoanalysts and others' containing his reviews of works by Klein, Guntrip, Winnicott and Bowlby. These latter sections are headed with the straight names of the author under consideration and earlier catchy but ephemeral journalistic titles (such as 'A great mother's helper' to introduce Winnicott) have mercifully been dropped. This section alone provides a very useful assembly of Rycroft's views on the British Object Relations theorists; and it is valuable to have united and linked in one section on Bowlby (Ch. 14) three separate reviews on the three volumes of Attachment and Loss, which first appeared in three different journals and in the different years of publication of each volume.
The whole collection might be seen as the third volume of Rycroft's collected works, the first two be