Ernest Jones

Introduction

Alfred Ernest Jones (1 January 1879 – 11 February 1958) was a Welsh physician and neurologist who became the first psychoanalyst practising in English and, more than anyone else, the man who organised psychoanalysis as an international institution. He met Sigmund Freud at the first psychoanalytical congress in Salzburg in 1908 and remained close to him until Freud's death in 1939. Over the following three decades he founded or refounded the bodies through which Anglophone psychoanalysis ran its affairs, edited its journals and its book series, secured English translation rights for Freud's writing, and wrote the authorised three-volume life of Freud.

Jones is also one of the more difficult figures in the history of psychology. His early medical career collapsed amid complaints about his conduct with child patients, his reputation never fully recovered, and historians have since treated his Freud biography as a highly partial document even while relying on it. Both threads belong in any account of him, and neither cancels the other: without his energy and organisational skill it is hard to see how psychoanalysis would have survived the 1930s in the English-speaking world.

Early Life and Education

Jones was born at Gowerton, near Swansea in Glamorgan, on New Year's Day 1879, the eldest child and only son of Thomas Jones, a self-taught colliery engineer who became a company officer at the Elba Steel Works, and Mary Ann Jones, née Lewis. Two younger sisters followed, Elizabeth and Sybil. The household was Welsh-speaking in its surroundings though not in its practice; Jones never learned Welsh fluently, a failure he regretted, and he later became a committed member of the Welsh Nationalist Party.

He won scholarships first to Swansea Grammar School and then to Llandovery College, and went up to University College, Cardiff, at sixteen before moving to University College London and its hospital for the clinical part of his training. He qualified MRCS and LRCP in 1900, took the London MB in 1901 and BS the following year, won a gold medal in obstetrics, and took the MD in 1903 and membership of the Royal College of Physicians in 1904, adding a Cambridge diploma in public health in 1905. Among his teachers were Victor Horsley and John Rose Bradford, and he began to specialise in neurology, influenced by Hughlings Jackson. His closest friend was the surgeon Wilfred Trotter, with whom he shared rooms above a Harley Street practice, with Jones's sister Elizabeth as housekeeper; Trotter later married her.

Jones wrote that he came across Freud's work in 1905, reading the Dora case history in a German psychiatric journal, and formed "the deep impression of there being a man in Vienna who actually listened with attention to every word his patients said to him." Some archival sources date the discovery to 1906.

Academic and Professional Career

Jones set out to combine analytic ideas with work on children. In 1906 he was arrested and charged with indecent assault on two adolescent girls he had examined in his capacity as an inspector of schools for children then described as "mentally defective." He maintained his innocence, arguing that the girls were fantasising; the magistrate declined to put the word of such children to a jury and Jones was acquitted. In 1908, working as pathologist at a London hospital, he accepted a colleague's challenge to demonstrate a repressed sexual memory behind a young girl's hysterical paralysis, interviewing her without informing her consultant and without a chaperone. Her parents complained and he was forced to resign. His career in Britain was effectively over, and later that year he emigrated to Canada.

In Toronto he taught in the University of Toronto's department of psychiatry, from 1911 as associate professor, served as pathologist to the Toronto Asylum and director of its psychiatric outpatient clinic, and built an analytic practice. He lectured widely and met Granville Stanley Hall, whose invitation brought Freud to Clark University in 1909. He had already met Carl Jung at a neurological congress in Amsterdam in 1907, and with Jung planned the 1908 Salzburg congress, where he read a paper introducing the term "rationalisation" and met Freud.

In 1911 Jones convened the inaugural meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association and served as its first secretary until 1913; in 1910 he had helped found the American Psychopathological Association. After a brief analysis with Sándor Ferenczi he returned to London in 1913 and founded the London Psychoanalytical Society, only four of whose fifteen original members were analysts. It foundered during the war, and in 1919 he replaced it with the British Psychoanalytical Society, serving as its president until 1944. He also founded a low-cost psychoanalytic clinic and, with John Rickman, the Institute of Psychoanalysis, and he was twice president of the International Psychoanalytical Association, from 1920 to 1924 and again from 1932 until 1949. He launched the International Journal of Psychoanalysis in 1920 and edited it to 1939, and established the International Psychoanalytic Library, which issued some fifty volumes under his editorship. His long campaign inside the medical establishment bore fruit in 1929, when the British Medical Association formally recognised psychoanalysis as a serious discipline.

From 1933 he organised the rescue of analysts fleeing Nazism, and after the Anschluss he travelled to Vienna to negotiate Freud's own departure for London. Bombing drove him out of London to Sussex in 1940, where he began to write Freud's life. He married the Welsh composer Morfydd Llwyn Owen in February 1917; she died in September 1918 following appendicitis surgery. In 1919 he married Katherine Jökl of Vienna, and they had four children. Diagnosed with bladder cancer in 1956, he nevertheless delivered Freud centenary lectures in New York and London and unveiled the plaque at 20 Maresfield Gardens. He died in London on 11 February 1958.

Major Contributions to Psychology

Institutional Leadership

Jones's distinctive contribution was organisational rather than discovery-driven. He built, dissolved and rebuilt societies, negotiated between rival analysts, secured funding and publishers, and kept a fractious movement in being through two wars. He wrote more than three hundred papers and roughly a dozen books, but his larger work was the apparatus around psychoanalysis.

Terms and Theories

He introduced "rationalisation" into psychology to describe the self-serving reasons people offer for actions whose true motives are unconscious. Following Melanie Klein's lectures of 1925, which he had arranged, his theoretical interests moved toward early development, culminating in the coinage "aphanisis" for the dread of the permanent extinction of the capacity for sexual enjoyment, and in his refinement of the castration complex. He also originated "phallocentrism" as a critical term, and argued alongside Klein and Karen Horney that femininity is primary rather than a reaction to the discovery of anatomical difference.

Applied Psychoanalysis

Jones applied analysis well beyond the clinic. His monograph On the Nightmare (1931) interpreted the nightmare through folk belief and sexual symbolism. His best known applied essay, first written in 1910 and later expanded as Hamlet and Oedipus (1949), read the prince's hesitation through unconscious conflict in a way that shaped literary criticism for decades.

The Freud Biography

The three volumes published by the Hogarth Press in 1953, 1955 and 1957 set out Freud's life, and besides, as Jones conceived it, his work. A one-volume abridgement by Lionel Trilling and Steven Marcus appeared in 1961. The book sold remarkably well and became the standard account for a generation.

Major Publications

Papers on Psycho-Analysis (1912; revised and expanded through 1948) — the collected theoretical and clinical papers, including the 1908 paper that introduced "rationalisation." The successive editions track the movement of his interests toward early development under the influence of the Klein lectures he had arranged in 1925.
On the Nightmare (1931) — the applied monograph that reads the nightmare through folk belief and sexual symbolism, and the most substantial of his excursions outside the clinic.
Hamlet and Oedipus (1949) — the expansion of a 1910 essay into the reading of the prince's hesitation as unconscious conflict, a reading that shaped literary criticism for decades and remains his most widely known piece of applied analysis.
The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, three volumes (1953, 1955, 1957) — the standard biography for a generation, written with access to Freud's correspondence and to the family. It was abridged in one volume by Lionel Trilling and Steven Marcus in 1961.
Free Associations: Memories of a Psycho-Analyst (1959) — his autobiography, published posthumously, and the main source for the institutional history of psychoanalysis in Britain as he lived it.

Impact and Legacy

The permanent charge against Jones concerns the biography. Hans Eysenck called it the most famous life of Freud but judged it "more a mythology than a history," suppressing material that would reflect badly on its subject. Roy Porter called it "hagiographical and bowdlerized." Richard Wollheim observed that although Jones had lived inside Freud's circle for decades, he could write only what Anna Freud found acceptable. R. Andrew Paskauskas showed that Jones silently altered the spelling, grammar and punctuation of the Freud letters he quoted, and misattributed letters to Freud that he himself had written. Borch-Jacobsen and Shamdasani called the book "a brilliant dramatisation of the Freudian legend," arguing that Jones used documents available to no one else to confirm Freud's own account while eliding contradictions, notably over the Fleischl-Marxow cocaine episode. Louis Breger added that the official status of the commission, and Jones's hostility to dissidents such as Otto Rank and Ferenczi, made the bias structural.

Defenders accept some of this and contest the rest. Peter Gay, himself no disciple, called it the classic biography and judged the charge of malice toward rivals overstated, noting that Jones's harsh final verdict on Ferenczi largely repeated what Freud had written privately to him. Frank Sulloway called the book monumental and indispensable while recognising it as the fullest expression of the Freud legend. Christopher Badcock pointed out that it remains the only biography containing summaries of all Freud's work known at the time. Whatever its distortions, the letters Jones quoted were often published in full only after 1990, so critics were for decades unable to check him.

The earlier scandals raise a harder question. Jones's own account appears in Free Associations, published after his death, where he maintained that the children concerned had projected their own sexual feelings onto him and admitted his naivety about how his interviews would look. He was cleared in court, and his supporters point out that the magistrate's reasoning reflected a period inclined to disbelieve children rather than exonerate him fairly. Modern historians, however, generally read the 1908 episode less charitably than he did: whatever the analytic justification, interviewing a child patient about sexual material without informing her consultant or providing a chaperone disregarded ordinary clinical safeguards, and the consequence was that a troubled child's treatment was overshadowed by the analyst's interest in demonstrating a point. Together with his formation in 1912, with Freud's agreement, of a loyalist committee that helped manoeuvre Jung out of the presidency of the International Psychoanalytical Association, these episodes make up the case against him as a movement politician.

His institutional achievements nonetheless survive their author. The societies he founded still train analysts; the International Journal of Psychoanalysis still appears; and the London clinic model he promoted, offering treatment at reduced fees, became standard practice. His wartime work brought dozens of analysts to safety and secured Freud's release from Vienna, without which much of European psychoanalysis would have perished. The British Society he presided over for twenty-five years absorbed both Anna Freud's and Melanie Klein's traditions precisely because he had insisted on keeping them in one organisation during the so-called controversial discussions of the 1940s, an outcome that his successors secured by allowing parallel training tracks.

Learn More

Sigmund Freud, whose life and work Jones chronicled and defended.
Anna Freud, whose child analytic tradition clashed with Jones's support for Klein.
Melanie Klein, whose London career Jones made possible.
Karen Horney, whose arguments about femininity Jones took up against Freud.

References

Jones, E. (1953-1957). Sigmund Freud: Life and Work. Basic Books.