ABSTRACT
When James Strachey died in April 1967 he was 79 years old. Naturally, there are but few alive who knew him in a personal way, and it is therefore not easy to find the material for a biographical comment. Strachey was the product of what used to be a very definite grouping in English society, the Indian Civil Service. Gradually Strachey came round to his main psycho-analytic contribution, a series of lectures in 1933 in which he formulated the concept of the mutative interpretation. He made explicit the principle of economic interpretation, interpretation at the point of urgency, accurately timed, gathering together the material presented by the patient and clearly dealing with a sample of transference neurosis. Strachey was very bored with all the controversies that led to the splitting of the Society around personalities rather than around the difficulties inherent in Sigmund Freud's contribution and out of the scientific developments based on clinical psycho-analysis.
