Wilfred Trotter

Wilfred Batten Lewis Trotter, FRS

Trotter was also the surgeon, at University College London for whom Wilfred Bion worked as a resident during his own medical training, before he famously studied groups and trained as a psychoanalyst at the Tavistock Clinic. In her account of Bion's life "The Days of our Years," his wife, Francesca, writes of the great influence Trotter had on the direction of Bion's work concerning group relations.

Edward Bernays, author of Propaganda and nephew of Freud, also refers to Trotter and Gustave Le Bon in his writings. Trotter met Sigmund Freud several times. According to Ernest Jones (Freud's first biographer), "he was one of the first two or three in England to appreciate the significance of Freud's work, which I came to know through him. He was one of the rapidly diminishing group who attended the first International Congress at Salzburg in 1908".