ABSTRACT
This chapter summarizes Charles Rycroft's critique of psychoanalysis as he encountered it in the period between 1940 and 1960 while training and working within the British Psychoanalytical Society. It explains the theoretical perspective and psychotherapeutic methods that he developed in opposition to the conventional psychoanalysis of his day. The chapter shows that themes in contemporary psychoanalytic psychotherapy, even though he never formed a distinct school or movement or acquired overt followers, many of his ideas have passed into common currency. Rycroft's central critique of classical psychoanalysis is that it presents itself as a causal theory of human behaviour rather than, as he chose to view it, as a theory of meaning. Psychoanalysis purports to find the causal or etiological origin of neurotic behaviour, and, armed with this knowledge, the patient is then supposedly liberated from its thrall. Rycroft's perspective has the huge advantage of liberating dreams and slips of the tongue, and psychoanalysis generally, from the tyranny of psychic determinism.
