Imagination and Reality

'One can single out some features from this very complex structure of clinical sensibility and theoretical thinking. Perhaps its most striking characteristic is an empiricism- that addresses itself to the study of the totalperson in the clinical setting. Reading Dr Rycroft's papers on technique one is immediately struck by the patient as a person on the one hand and the extreme sensitivity to the imaginative and psychic processes of which language is par excellence the vehicle on the other. He conceives of language not merely as a technical idiom for transcribing instinctual derivatives, but rather as the vehicle of imaginative processes which articulate the whole being, and shares with Ella Sharpe, Winnicott, and Marion Milner an acute awareness of the role played by the imagination at every level of mental functioning. One consequence of this emphasis on imagination is a shift from considering inner life as a self-sealed unit to that of evaluating the total experience of the patient as a person and his affectivity in terms of his cultural reality and its tradition.'This collection ofhis papers testifies not only to his singular sensitivity and talent as an analyst but it also reflects the climate of intellectual thought and clinical research typical of the British school of psycho-analysis during these decades.'- M.R. Khan and J.D. Sutherland, from the Introduction