Robert W. Rentoul

Robert Wylie Rentoul was born in England of a noted Irish ministerial family. He himself became a minister of the Church of Scotland and a member of the Iona Community after doing a degree in Chemistry at Oxford University and theological training in Cambridge. He worked as a minister for many years in India. On his return to Britain he obtained a degree in psychology from the University of Bristol, became an Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society, trained as a psychoanalytical psychotherapist, and practised for more than thirty years in an industrial city in the English Midlands where psychotherapy was a new concept. His own experience of therapy made him determined to find some more human and respectful way of working with people's problems than the analytic model then current. He eventually found such a model in Sandor Ferenczi's emphasis on the presence of a child-in-the-adult in any analysis, and on the need for an approach which honours this.

He was for many years a training therapist, supervisor, seminar-leader and lecturer for the psychoanalytic psychotherapy training institute in Birmingham, UK. He worked for some time as Assistant Director and Principal Psychotherapist at Heronbrook House International Therapeutic Community, Birmingham; and as Staff Facilitator in a Psychotherapy Unit of the National Health Service in Stafford. Along with this he lectured in the University of Bristol in psychology, immediately after completing his degree there; and subsequently in the Universi-ties of Birmingham and of Wolverhampton in psychodynamics and in counselling psychology.

He is now retired and lives with his wife in Wells, Somerset. They have two sons and two daughters, all with their own children, and all of whom have achieved distinction in their re-spective fields. He also has a sense of humour.