"Ablation of the parental images": a secret core in Charles Rycroft's psychoanalytic thought.

This article arises from the need to "present" (that is, to read again in a "present and actual" light) the paper, "Why Analysts Need Their Patients' Transferences" by Charles Rycroft (which first appeared in 1993 and is re-published in this Special Issue), and is therefore strictly connected to the ideas the latter contains. The authors, on the one hand, outline the stages of the journey that took Rycroft to elaborate the concept of "ablation of the parental images", and on the other, retrace his personal "analytic genealogy" and discover a "missing forefather", Sándor Ferenczi, who has represented for a long time a direct "missing link" in the history of psychoanalysis.