ABSTRACT
Within the "impossible" profession of psychoanalysis, Charles Rycroft was an outstanding, if mercurial, figure. Bom into the heart of the English Establishment, he was by nature a radical who in the 1930s saw the menace of Fascism long before most members of his class paid it any heed. At Cambridge he briefly joined the Communist Party, visited the Soviet Union, and then, as part of a Bloomsbury milieu, which included Virginia Woolf's brother Adrian Stephen, became interested in the subversive discipline of psychoanalysis. As a psychoanalyst he avoided jargon, and in his theoretical writing he always simplified Sigmund Freud's technical terms and discarded whatever seemed to him inappropriately brought in from sciences such as physics. He related human behaviour to biology and insisted that psychoanalytic thinking was a linguistic discipline, being clinically a search for meaning; he pointed out that Freud's greatest book was entitled The Interpretation of Dreams, not The Explanation of Dreams.
