This book reconstructs the story of Roy Coupland Winn 1890-1963, Australia’s first fulltime practising psychoanalyst, of whom it was said that he was ‘dedicated to the continual inner search to understand himself and others’.

From a background of privilege, he volunteered in 1915 and cut his teeth as a military medic on Gallipoli. On the Western Front he gained a Military Cross, lost his foot and was left wondering if he wasn’t losing his mind too. In recuperation, he first encountered psychoanalysis - as a patient. He also wrote Men May Rise, a novel he said was ‘rather more biographical than customary’. The author has provided a superb chart of her grandfather’s war and early post-war years from it, showing how he had already embarked on the inner search.

Back in Sydney, the new psychoanalysis was widely mistrusted in medical circles, but he lived his own life, professional and private, according to his own code, ‘seemingly unswayed by the prevailing moral climate or conventional social niceties’. Witty, self-mocking, insightful and inventive, the kindness and tolerance others saw in him is perhaps best expressed in these lines he once wrote:

Most satisfying hope of human race
Immortal history in a baby’s face.