Charles Rycroft
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Charles Frederick Rycroft (1914-1998) was a British psychologist and a well-known author. For most of his career he had a private psychiatric practice in London.
He was a critic of contemporary psychoanalysis, believing it to be rigid and formulaic. He believed that the ideal of rationality proposed by modern psychiatry alienated the adult from his or her creative inner processes. His work with dream analysis stressed the positive aspects of imagination, and thought imagination could be beneficial to psychic development. In 1968 he resigned from the British Psychoanalytical Society.
Rycroft was a consultant psychoanalyst at the Tavistock Clinic from 1956 until 1968, and for a period of time was an assistant editor of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis and a training analyst with famed Scottish psychologist R.D. Laing. His best known book is a Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis, other works include Imagination and Reality, Anxiety and Neurosis, The Innocence of Dreams, Psychoanalysis and Beyond and Viewpoints.
