Ernest Jones

Jones was born on 1 January 1879 at Gowerton, near Swansea, the son of Thomas and Mary Ann Jones. He was educated in Swansea and then, on a scholarship, at Llandovery College. He studied medicine at University College, Cardiff, and University College, London. He qualified in 1900 and the following year took the London MB with gold medals in medicine and obstetrics. Within five years he had added the MD, membership of the Royal College of Physicians and a diploma in public health. He specialised in neurology and held a number of posts in London hospitals, and a growing interest in Continental psychiatric literature led him to experiment with hypnosis in his clinical work.

Around 1906, with his friend the surgeon Wilfred Trotter, he came upon Freud's writings, and he learned German to read them. His London career was meanwhile broken by a series of setbacks. In 1906 he was charged with indecent assault on two girls he had interviewed as an inspector of schools for children then classed as mentally defective, and he was acquitted. In 1908 he was obliged to resign a hospital post after questioning a young patient about the sexual memory behind a hysterical paralysis without telling her consultant. In 1907 he met Carl Gustav Jung at a congress of neurologists in Amsterdam, and he spent time in Munich. He proposed the first international meeting of psychoanalysts, held at Salzburg in April 1908, where he read his paper on rationalization and met Freud for the first time; that spring he also visited Freud in Vienna with A. A. Brill.

Soon afterwards he left for Canada to head a newly founded psychiatric clinic in Toronto. There he taught psychiatry at the University of Toronto, where he became associate professor, and served as pathologist to the Toronto Asylum. His long relationship with Loe Kann, a Dutch woman who had first come to him as a patient in 1906, ended in 1913, by which time she was in analysis with Freud. At Freud's wish, Jones went that year into a short analysis with Ferenczi. He later described it as perhaps the first analysis an analyst undertook for his own sake, before training analysis existed (The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud¹).

In February 1917 Jones married Morfydd Llwyn Owen, who died in September 1918. In 1919 he married Katherine Jökl of Vienna; he had four children. Proud of his Welsh origins, he joined the Welsh Nationalist Party, Plaid Cymru. He was elected a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in 1942 and received an honorary doctorate of science from the University of Wales in 1954. He retired in 1946 to his cottage in Sussex. In his last years, though suffering from cancer of the bladder, he wrote the biography of Freud and began an autobiography. He died in London on 11 February 1958, and his ashes were laid in the grave of his eldest child at Cheriton, on Gower.

In North America Jones was assistant editor of Morton Prince's Journal of Abnormal Psychology. He published psychoanalytic papers there, among them Rationalization in Every-Day Life² in 1908. He co-founded the American Psychopathological Association in 1910, and in 1911 he organised the American Psychoanalytic Association, serving as its first secretary until 1913. In September 1909 he was with Freud, Jung and Ferenczi at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, where Freud lectured. Papers he had read to medical and psychological societies in Britain, Canada and the United States made up his first book, Papers on Psycho-Analysis³ (1913), one of the earliest presentations of Freud's work for English-speaking doctors.

In 1912, out of a conversation with Ferenczi, Jones proposed a secret Committee of Freud's closest followers to guard the basic tenets of psychoanalysis. By 1922 its members were Ferenczi, Rank, Karl Abraham, Hanns Sachs, Max Eitingon and Jones himself. Jones later told the story of the Committee from the inside in his biography of Freud (The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud¹).

Jones returned to London in 1913 with no prospect of a university or hospital post. He founded the London Psycho-Analytical Society that year, but later dissolved it because several of its leading members favoured Jung. In 1919 he founded the British Psycho-Analytical Society in its place and presided over it until 1944. He raised money for a clinic offering subsidised fees, the first psychoanalytic clinic in Britain, and founded the Institute of Psycho-Analysis to provide administrative, publishing and training facilities. In 1920 he founded the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, which he edited until 1939, and from 1921 he edited the International Psycho-Analytical Library, which issued some fifty volumes. He obtained the English translation rights to Freud's works and coordinated a group of translators, among them James Strachey, Alix Strachey, Joan Riviere and John Rickman, in the first systematic English translation of Freud. Riccardo Steiner credits him with many of the English terms of Freud's technical vocabulary. In 1929 Jones's evidence to a committee of the British Medical Association led it to recommend that psychoanalysis be accepted as a form of treatment. He was president of the International Psychoanalytical Association from 1920 to 1924 and again from 1932 to 1949, when he was made its honorary president.

Klein lectured in London in 1925, and at Jones's invitation she settled there in 1926. Her analyses of young children shaped his own views on female development and the early Oedipus complex (The Early Development of Female Sexuality⁴). In May 1927 the British Society held a symposium on child analysis that answered the views of Anna Freud, with Jones siding with Klein; the dispute foreshadowed the later Controversial Discussions. Freud accused Jones of orchestrating a campaign against him and his daughter, and cordial relations returned only later, after exchange lectures that Jones arranged with Anna Freud. In the early 1940s, when the conflict between the followers of Klein and of Anna Freud came to a head in the British Society, Jones sought to mediate between them. Illness and the difficulty of wartime travel kept him from most of the meetings, and he resigned the presidency in 1944. Under the presidency of Sylvia Payne a compromise was then reached that set up parallel training courses for the followers of Klein, the followers of Anna Freud and a non-aligned Middle or Independent Group.

After the Anschluss of 1938 Jones flew to Vienna and helped negotiate the emigration of Freud and his family. To obtain British permits he drew on his personal relationship with the Home Secretary, Sir Samuel Hoare, a fellow member of his London skating club. In these years he also helped nearly fifty endangered analysts, many of them Jewish, to resettle in England and other countries.

Jones's first theoretical paper, read at Salzburg in 1908, brought the term rationalization into psychoanalysis. Starting from Freud's demonstration that many mental processes have causes the person neither knows nor will admit, he sorted the mechanisms that hide these causes into two classes. In the first the person holds that no explanation is needed, as when slips and chance actions are put down to accident. Jones read the resistance to asking where such acts come from as a sign that their source is unacceptable, and so brought parapraxes into the same scheme. In the second class the person supplies a plausible but false explanation, because everyone needs to give a connected and rational account of themselves. False explanations formed mainly for oneself he called evasions; those formed with an eye to the opinion of one's circle he called rationalisations (Rationalization in Every-Day Life²). The paper became the opening chapter of Papers on Psycho-Analysis. That book's other papers contrast psychoanalysis with suggestion, which in Jones's account works through a transference of positive feeling onto the physician and replaces symptoms with dependence. They also set out Freud's theory of dreams, of the neuroses and of sublimation, and treat neurotic symptoms as failed or imperfect sublimations (Papers on Psycho-Analysis³).

In 1910, in the American Journal of Psychology, Jones worked up into a full study a hypothesis Freud had sketched in a footnote to The Interpretation of Dreams⁵: that Hamlet's delay springs from the Oedipus complex. He reviewed the critical literature and rejected explanations from Hamlet's temperament or from external obstacles, describing Hamlet's state as a "specific aboulia", an inability to will one particular act. By killing Hamlet's father and marrying his mother, Claudius had carried out Hamlet's own repressed wishes, so the duty to kill him was bound up with those wishes and inhibited along with them. Jones also placed the story among the hero myths studied by Rank and Abraham, and linked the play to the death of Shakespeare's father in 1601 (The Œdipus-Complex as an Explanation of Hamlet's Mystery⁶). He later expanded the essay, eventually into the book Hamlet and Oedipus (1949).

The Theory of Symbolism⁷ (1918) expanded a lecture given to the British Psychological Society in 1916. It reserved the term symbolism for one kind of indirect representation, the unconscious kind, as distinct from metaphor, simile and emblem. Modifying criteria proposed by Rank and Sachs, Jones held that a true symbol represents unconscious material, keeps a nearly constant meaning, is not determined by individual factors alone, and has parallels in myth, cult and religion. The symbols run into thousands, but the ideas they stand for are few: the bodily self, the closest relatives, and birth, love and death. Against Jung, he argued that symbols are recreated by each individual rather than inherited ready-made. His touchstone was that only what is repressed is symbolised, and only the repressed needs to be. On these grounds he rejected the "functional" and "anagogic" readings of Herbert Silberer and Jung, which take abstract tendencies for the meaning of a symbol; in his view they diluted the concept and, in treatment, often served resistance. In metaphor, he concluded, feeling is over-sublimated; in the true symbol it is under-sublimated.

The Early Development of Female Sexuality⁴, read at the Innsbruck Congress on 1 September 1927, opened by endorsing Horney's warning that analytic views of early female development were distorted by bias. Jones suggested that male analysts had taken an unduly phallocentric view that underrated the female organs. He argued that castration is only a partial threat, and proposed the name aphanisis for the total and permanent extinction of the capacity and opportunity for sexual enjoyment. This, he held, is the fundamental dread of both sexes and underlies all the neuroses; in this way he recast the castration complex as one special case of a wider fear. The sexes differ in how they imagine aphanisis: the boy as castration, the girl, more dependent on her partner, as separation and desertion. Drawing on Klein's analyses, he described direct transitions from the oral stage to the Oedipal situation in girls. He distinguished a pre-Oedipal from a post-Oedipal penis envy, the latter a regressive defence against the privation of the girl's incestuous wishes. He also suggested that the phallic phase Freud described in girls was a secondary, defensive formation rather than a true developmental stage. The same paper proposed that guilt and the super-ego are built up from within, to protect the child from the stress of ungratified libido, and that the child exploits external disapproval rather than simply submitting to it.

Though he remained loyal to Freud, Jones differed from him on female sexuality, on lay analysis, on telepathy and on the merits of Klein's work. In the biography he was sceptical of the death drive but valued Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety and Freud's later theory of the ego (The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud¹).

Jones's biography of Freud appeared from the Hogarth Press in three volumes: The Formative Years and the Great Discoveries, 1856–1900 (1953), Years of Maturity, 1901–1919 (1955) and The Last Phase, 1919–1939 (1957). Freud's family opened to him letters and papers no outsider had seen, among them the letters to Martha Bernays and to Wilhelm Fliess. His wife translated much of the early correspondence, and Anna Freud supplied material from the archive. Jones set himself two aims. The first was to record the facts of Freud's life while they could still be checked, against the legends already gathering. The second was to relate Freud's personality to the growth of his ideas, since in his view psychoanalysis could be understood only as a historical development bound up with its founder.

He traced the principles of Freud's psychology to Brücke and the Helmholtz school of physiology rather than to Charcot or Breuer, and he was critical of Freud's enthusiasm for cocaine. He held that Freud suffered a considerable psychoneurosis in the 1890s, which the self-analysis begun in 1897 worked through, and he regarded The Interpretation of Dreams as Freud's greatest and most original book. He explained the breaks with Adler, Stekel and Jung as a return of resistance presenting itself as new theory, and he attributed the departures of Rank and Ferenczi, and the end of the Committee, chiefly to their failing mental health. Writing as both biographer and participant, he recorded Freud's secretiveness, his indiscretion and his poor judgement of people alongside his integrity and courage, and he told his own part in the founding of the Committee and in the emigration of 1938 (The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud¹). A one-volume abridgement by Lionel Trilling and Steven Marcus appeared in 1961.

Riccardo Steiner, in the International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis, calls Jones "the finest organizer and politician in the first generation of Freud's followers", and writes that before the Second World War he effectively ruled psychoanalysis in England. His term rationalization was taken up by Freud and has remained part of the vocabulary of psychoanalysis (Rationalization in Every-Day Life²). The Theory of Symbolism became the standard reference for the strict psychoanalytic concept of the symbol, and Klein and later Hanna Segal built on it in their accounts of symbol formation (The Theory of Symbolism⁷). His 1927 paper, with the work of Horney, Helene Deutsch and Klein on which it drew, set the London position against the Vienna view in the debate on female sexuality. Jones and these analysts argued for a primary femininity, against Freud's account of the girl's phallic phase (The Early Development of Female Sexuality⁴). His reading of Hamlet, begun in 1910, carried Freud's hint about the play into a full literary analysis, which he went on revising for four decades.

The biography was published to wide acclaim and for decades stood as the standard life of Freud, valued above all for the documents it first made public. It also drew criticism. In 1958 Erich Fromm publicly contested its claim that Rank and Ferenczi had become psychotic, citing testimony from people close to Ferenczi in his last years, and in Sigmund Freud's Mission (1959) he criticised Jones's picture of Freud. Later critics objected to the book's partisanship towards the dissenters, and historians have questioned some of its stories, among them Jones's account, based on what Freud told him privately, of the end of Breuer's treatment of Anna O. (The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud¹).

Jones published more than three hundred papers and about a dozen books. His first book, Papers on Psycho-Analysis³ (1913), was revised in later editions; the second, of 1918, added The Theory of Symbolism, and Jones re-edited the book in 1948. His papers include Rationalization in Every-Day Life² (1908), The Œdipus-Complex as an Explanation of Hamlet's Mystery⁶ (1910), The Theory of Symbolism⁷ (1918) and The Early Development of Female Sexuality⁴ (1927). Among his later books are On the Nightmare (1931), Hamlet and Oedipus (1949) and The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud¹ (three volumes, 1953–1957). His unfinished autobiography, Free Associations, was published in 1959, the year after his death.