ABSTRACT
Charles Rycroft began his private practice in 1947, before completing his psychoanalytic training. He was still practising a week before his death in 1998, just over half a century later. This chapter provides some idea of the development of his thinking from his early writing, when he was within the mainstream of the British Society, to his late development as an independent thinker and writer. It explains a brief account of his background and education. Rycroft read economics and history at Cambridge and then spent a year as a research student in modern history. He was briefly a member of the Communist Party, which he later described as a fashionable thing to do, but he was soon disillusioned. The British Psychoanalytical Society had been severely traumatized by the controversial discussions during the war. The Kleinians and the Freudians were numerically small groups, and the majority or Middle Group had no recognizable leader.
