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This has been an interesting book to review. Before starting to write, I could not resist doing some crude arithmetic, to help me to order my mixed reactions and responses. Of the 25 chapters, nine are papers and articles, some appearing here for the first time; fourteen are reviews and two are autobiographical pieces. The proportion is significant. Having studied and classified the contents of Rycroft's complete bibliography up to 1984, I found he has written five books, edited one and contributed chapters to several others. He has had 153 reviews published; the peak year was 1967 when he wrote seventeen, and four of his books appeared in that part of the Sixties.
Armed with a good degree in economics and history from Cambridge, with experience in the University communist party, and having qualified in medicine at University College, London, and completed his training analysis (with Ella Sharpe, then Sylvia Payne), Rycroft went into full-time psychoanalytical practice in 1947. He was soon serving on committees, holding various offices and writing ‘scientific’ (sic) papers. I remember that in one of the first papers of his that I read, ‘On idealisation, illusion and catastrophic disillusion’, he linked a poem of Leopardi's—in which there is a dream of the moon tumbling and crashing into the middle of a field—with a patient's dream ‘in which the moon fell out of the sky into a dustbin’.
Rycroft's losses were not so sudden and his adaptation to loss has been conspicuously successful. In ‘Where I came from’, he writes about his gradual alienation, over many years, from those who wielded power in the British Psycho-Analytical Society: they had no objection to his doing administrative work for them, they praised his papers politely, sincerely, but often uncomprehendingly, and he found that for him they had become ‘people of whose values I did not approve’. Both the business of the Society and the controversies ‘were entirely alien to me’. ‘By Cambridge standards the analyt