This paper explores Rycroft's views on narcissistic barriers to the formation of analytic identity, together with the analyst's relation to (or ablation of) his forbears. It sketches Rycroft's relation to his training analysts, Ella Sharpe and Sylvia Payne and the British Freudian tradition, delineating a line of descent running from Hanns Sachs, through Sharpe and Payne to Rycroft. Rycroft defined himself in creative dialogue with Freud and his own contemporaries within the British Freudian tradition.