John Rickman

Who was John Rickman?

John Rickman was an English psychoanalyst.

John Rickman was the only child in an extended Quaker family and was throughout his life a practicing Quaker. His father ran an ironmonger’s shop in Dorking and died of tuberculosis when John was 2. His mother never remarried, and the main male influences in his early life were his grandfathers. John’s maternal grandfather was often unkind to him, something he recalled years later when in analysis with Sandor Ferenczi. He was at Leighton Park, the Quaker school near Reading, along with two other leading members of the British Psychoanalytical Society, Helton Godwin Baynes and Lionel Penrose. Rickman later studied Natural Sciences at King’s College, Cambridge, followed by Medicine at St Thomas’s Hospital in London.