William Halse Rivers Rivers, FRCP, FRS, (1864-1922) was an English anthropologist, neurologist, ethnologist and psychiatrist, best known for his work with soldiers during World War I who were suffering from shell shock. Rivers's most famous patient was the poet Siegfried Sassoon. He is also famous for his participation in the Torres Straits expedition of 1898, and his consequent seminal work on the subject of kinship. Conflict and Dreams was posthumously published in 1923 a year after Rivers's death and continues his theoretical reflection on his War experience as a therapist from his 1920 work 'Instinct and the Unconscious'.