John Rickman (10 April 1891 – 1 July 1951) was an English psychoanalyst. Early life John Rickman was the only child in an extended Quaker family and was throughout his life a practising 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 Sándor 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' Hospital in London. First World War When the First World War broke out, John continued his training and faced with conscription, became a conscientious objector and refused to join up. In 1916 Rickman joined 'the Friends' War Victims Relief Service' in the Samara Oblast province of South Russia, where there was great poverty and deprivation, and the Czar still ruled. There he taught peasant women how to nurse typhoid patients during an epidemic and made anthropological observations of the severe limitations of village life. In 1917 Rickman met an American social worker Lydia Cooper Lewis, who had just joined the Relief Service unit. John and Lydia married in Buzuluk on 20 March 1918, after the revolution, and then set off on a dramatic and dangerous escape from the horrors of Civil War, arriving at Vladivostok after more than three months on a very slow trans-Siberian railway journey, frequently stopped and searched by rival agents of the civil war. Once home, Rickman worked as a medical officer with psychiatric patients at Fulbourn Hospital in Cambridge. In Cambridge he met W. H. R. Rivers, an anthropologist and physician who had treated soldiers traumatized by the war at Craiglockhart Hospital in Edinburgh. Rivers advised Rickman to seek an analysis with Freud. Between the wars In 1919 Rickman went to Vienna to have analysis with Freud. He made many contacts there, including Karl Abraham (1877–1925) and Sándor Ferenczi (1873–1933). He continued with Freud until 1922, when he qualified as a psychoanalyst. In 1928 he travelled to Budapest to have treatment from Ferenczi. In 1934 Rickman began an analysis with Melanie Klein that was to continue, intermittently, until