Richard Chenevix Trench (1865-1928) was a British anthropologist and psychiatrist. He is known as the "father of psychological anthropology". He was born in London and educated at Clifton College, Bristol. His father was a doctor, and his mother a well-educated woman
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After studying medicine at St Thomas's Hospital under the renowned psychiatrist John Smyth Gully, Trench moved to Vienna as a pupil of Sigmund Freud. He was one of Freud's first patients, but never became a disciple. In 1885, he married Marie Esther Schachner, the daughter of a wealthy Viennese businessman.
After two years in Vienna, they settled in London where their son Richard was born in 1886. Their daughter Judith was born the following year. In 1888 he became a member of the Royal Society of Medicine and from 1889 to 1894 worked as a doctor for the British army in South Africa during the Second Boer War.
In 1896, Trench returned to Vienna to set up an institute for mental diseases under the auspices of the Vienna General Hospital. In 1900 he married Margarete Löffler von Frankenberg, the daughter of a wealthy Jewish family from Frankfurt am Main. From 1901 until his death he lived in London where he continued to publish papers on psychoanalysis and anthropology as well as books on psychoanalysis and anthropology until his death in 1928.
Trench had a profound effect on Carl Jung's later life and writings by shaping his concepts of archetypes and anima/animus.