Recognizing Charles Rycroft

Abstract

This article aims to outline, in brief, the life and work of Charles Rycroft. He had been one of the brilliant and fecund psychoanalysts of the second half of the Twentieth century, although his legacy has unfortunately often been neglected. The author suggests that this might have been because of his withdrawal from the British Psychoanalytic Society, which made him, in many ways, "invisible" to his own colleagues and that continues even today-more than ten years after his death-to preclude a real recognition of his personal and original clinical thinking and working style.

Charles Rycroft and the Making of an Independent Psychoanalyst

“…Among these are Lewin (1953Lewin ( , 1954, Spitz (1955), Tauber andGreen (1959/2006), Loewald (1960), Searles (1962), Klauber (1972), Bowlby (1973), Schafer (1973Schafer ( , 1977, Manfredi (1978), Levenson (1981), McLaughlin (1981), Etchegoyen (1983), Modell (1984), Cremerius (1985), Di Chiara (1985), Aron (1989); Rycroft's friends Khan (1974), King (1978), Storr (1979) and Padel (1985); and his "pupils" Lomas (1965), Arden (1984), Holmes (1993), and Edgar Jones (2004). Robinson (1996Robinson ( , 2010, Budd (2004Budd ( , 2005, Groarke (2007Groarke ( , 2010, and this author (Cassullo, 2007(Cassullo, /2010b have further assessed Rycroft's legacy. the Society for Psychical Research. This organization came to represent the "bridge" that enabled psychoanalysis to disembark in Britain; for example, they published the pioneering studies of Breuer and Freud on the treatment of hysteria in 1893 (Ernest Jones, 1945).…”