He was at Leighton Park, the Quaker school near Reading, along with two other leading members of the British Psychoanalytical Society, Helton Godwin Baynes and Lionel Penrose.
In 1916 Rickman joined 'the Friends' War Victims Relief Service' in the Samara Oblast province of South Russia, where there was great poverty and deprivation, and the Czar still ruled.
There he taught peasant women how to nurse typhoid patients during an epidemic and made anthropological observations of the severe limitations of village life.
At the beginning of 1940 Rickman was sent to Wharncliffe Hospital near Sheffield, where his work attracted considerable interest and admiration from army psychologists and psychiatrists, including Wilfred Bion, who visited him there.
Rickman joined the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) and with the rank of major was posted to Northfield Military Hospital near Birmingham in July 1942.
Over three decades Rickman played an important part in the foundation and development of the British Psychoanalytical Society, and later, behind the scenes, in building a bridge between it and the Tavistock Clinic.
Most of his writing after the First World War was infused with psychoanalysis, but his experiences in Russia and Cambridge, and his Quaker commitment to social justice, sexual equality and non-violence, put him ahead of his time.