RYCROFT, CHARLES FREDERICK (1914-1998)

Psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Charles Frederick Rycroft was born on September, 9, 1914, in Basingstoke, England, and died on May, 24, 1998, in London.

Rycroft grew up in Hampshire. His father, Sir Richard, was a country squire and the fifth Baronet in a family that traced its ancestry to before the Norman Conquest. When Charles was eleven his father died, and an elder half-brother succeeded to the title and the estate. Charles was educated at Wellington College, and then Trinity College, Cambridge, from which he graduated with honors in 1936 in economics and history. Charles had briefly been a Communist at Cambridge, where the Bloomsbury analyst Karin Stephen encouraged him to apply for psychoanalytic training. Ernest Jones thought that Charles should become a qualified physician; accordingly he started his psychoanalytic and medical training in 1937. He was analyzed first by Ella Sharpe, and after her death by Sylvia Payne. He finally qualified in medicine in 1945.

For almost three decades Rycroft was the leading intellectual force in independent British psychoanalytic circles. Within the British Psychoanalytic Society he became an associate member in 1949, a full member in 1952, and a training analyst in 1954. He was joint librarian (1952-54) with Masud Khan, served on the editorial board of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis (1953-54), and was scientific secretary (1956-59). He began to write reviews and essays for The Observer and The New York Review of Books, and beginning in 1965 started to withdraw from the British Society. Rycroft was bored and alienated by the longstanding ideological quarrels within the British Society.

Nonetheless he analyzed such notable figures as R. D. Laing, Peter Lomas, and Alan Tyson, in addition to a series of eminent people within British intellectual life. He also became one of the most well-known public expositors on psychoanalytic matters, best known for his A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis (1968) and his book The Innocence of Dreams (1979). He remained in private practice until a week before he died.

Rycroft's special contribution to psychoanalysis stemmed directly from his being broadly well-educated and cultured. Out of his aristocratic background he succeeded in being a distinctive and original voice. He always stressed the constructive power of imagination, and he tried to steer clear of the reductionism and negativism that characterized so much of the early psychoanalytic thinking. Psychoanalysis belonged, he felt, within the humanities and moral sciences, not the natural sciences. He felt particularly inspired by the examples of Donald Winnicott and Erik Erikson, both of whom he considered kindred spirits. Rycroft took a special interest in the problem of creativity, and wrote on how analysts tended to rely on the "ablation" of their biological pasts, substituting instead their lineage in analytic training. The illusion of having created oneself was, he proposed, a defensive reaction characteristic of analysts, an ahistorical or anti-historical tendency that could be good individually but was not desirable for the field as a whole. Idealizations of the training analysis and the so-called apostolic succession follow from such use of ablation. Ablation as a concept can help understand why it has unfortunately been so often a case of lese-majesté to talk about Freud—who had his own difficulties acknowledging his antecedents—within the regular categories of intellectual history. Rycroft's spiritual daring was in a sense an extension of Freud's own historic independence, even though that common trait had inevitably to lead in different directions.

Rycroft, widely acknowledged for his general brilliance, represented the best tradition of British free-thinking within psychoanalysis. He not only interpreted dreams independently of Freud, but took an individual slant on Freud's whole legacy. Rycroft expressed himself in careful, understated prose that is rewarding for its subtleties.

Paul Roazen

See also: Creativity; Dream; Great Britain; Internal/external reality; Reich, Wilhelm.

Bibliography

Rycroft, Charles (Ed.). (1967). Psychoanalysis observed. New York: Coward.

——. (1968). Anxiety and neurosis. London: Allen Lane.

——. (1968). A critical dictionary of psychoanalysis. London: Nelson.

——. (1968). Imagination and reality. London: Hogarth Press.

——. (1971). Wilhelm Reich. New York: Viking.

——. (1979). The Innocence of dreams. London: Hogarth Press.

——. (1985). Psychoanalysis and beyond. London: Chatto.

——. (1991). Viewpoints. London: Hogarth.