His father was an English exporter and shipowner who also acted as British Vice-Counsul, and his mother came from an academic Baltic German family.
After serving as an interpreter with Military Intelligence with the British Expeditionary Force in North Russia, and then with the British Military Mission in South Russia and the Caucasus,[1] he studied natural sciences at St John's College, Cambridge and medicine at St Bartholomew's Hospital.
In 1928 he joined the recently founded Tavistock Clinic, rising to become Assistant Medical Director there from 1934 to 1946, and publishing a psychiatric textbook in 1939.
In 1946 Dicks was appointed the first Nuffield Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Leeds, but returned to the Tavistock in 1948, and remained there until 1965 as Deputy Director and Consultant Psychiatrist in charge of the Marital Unit.
[2] His work in de-Nazification led to his writing a book entitled Licensed Mass Murder - a sociopsychological study of some SS killers.