The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud

Ernest Jones's biography of Freud was published by 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). It was written with the support of Freud's family, who opened to Jones letters and papers no outsider had seen, among them the more than nine hundred letters to Martha Bernays and the letters to Wilhelm Fliess, and Jones drew as well on his own forty years' acquaintance with Freud as a member of the inner circle. In his preface he sets himself two aims: to record the facts of Freud's life while they could still be checked, against the legends already gathering, and to relate Freud's personality and experiences to the development of his ideas, since psychoanalysis can be understood only as a historical growth bound up with its founder. This summary is written from the one-volume abridgement of 1961 by Lionel Trilling and Steven Marcus, which keeps the narrative but drops the scholarly apparatus, most of Jones's exposition of Freud's theories, the long historical review of Freud's influence in the third volume, and the appendices of letters. The first part follows Freud from his birth at Freiberg in 1856 to The Interpretation of Dreams. Jones makes much of the tangled family into which he was born, with half-brothers as old as his mother and a nephew older than himself, and of his place as his mother's favourite, which he sees as the root of Freud's lifelong confidence. He argues that the principles of Freud's psychology came not from Charcot or Breuer but from Brücke's physiological institute and the Helmholtz school, and that Freud long held his own bent for speculation in check. He tells how Freud left research for medical practice so as to be able to marry, and describes the long and stormy engagement to Martha Bernays. He is critical of the cocaine episode: Freud's enthusiasm for the drug, the addiction of his friend Fleischl, and Freud's later playing down of his own advice to inject it. There follow the months with Charcot in Paris, the neurological work, above all the book on aphasia, and the collaboration with Breuer; for the ending of Anna O.'s treatment Jones relies on what Freud told him privately. He presents the road to free association as slow and laborious, and the giving up of the seduction theory in 1897 as the moment Freud came into his own. At the centre of the first volume stands the friendship with Fliess, which Jones calls the one truly extraordinary experience of Freud's life. He reads Freud's dependence on a man he judges intellectually inferior as a kind of delayed adolescence, and states plainly that through the 1890s Freud suffered from a considerable psychoneurosis, of swings of mood, fears of dying and anxiety about travel, which he links with the creative surge of those years. The self-analysis begun in 1897, in Jones's view Freud's most heroic feat, worked through this neurosis, uncovered the Oedipal constellation of his childhood and produced The Interpretation of Dreams, which Jones holds to be his greatest and most original book. The second part runs from the end of Freud's isolation to the end of the First World War. It covers the Wednesday Society of 1902, the support of Bleuler and Jung in Zurich, the first congress at Salzburg in 1908, the lectures at Clark University in 1909 and the founding of the International Psycho-Analytical Association in 1910, and documents the hostility of the medical world. Jones explains the breaks with Adler, Stekel and Jung as a return of resistance that gives up insight already gained and presents itself as a new theory, and adds a portrait of each dissenter's failings. He tells how he himself proposed in 1912 the secret Committee of loyal followers that was to guard the basic tenets. Two closing chapters portray Freud's daily routine, family life and character. Jones rejects the charges that he was tyrannical, dogmatic, arrogant or a pessimist, and defends his marriage against rumour, but he also admits Freud's secretiveness about himself, his indiscretion with the secrets of others, his black-and-white judgements of people, his poor judgement of men, and a hidden credulity that led him to trust Fliess and his patients' stories. The third part covers the last twenty years. After the hunger and losses of postwar Vienna, among them the death of his daughter Sophie in 1920, Jones relates the theoretical revisions of the 1920s. He denies that grief over Sophie produced the death drive and is himself sceptical of the idea, but praises Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety and the new theory of the ego. He attributes the dissolution of the Committee and the departures of Rank and Ferenczi chiefly to their failing mental health. He follows the cancer of the jaw from 1923, with its many operations, the disputes over lay analysis, the late writings on religion and civilization and Moses and Monotheism, the Goethe Prize of 1930, the Nazi destruction of psychoanalysis in Germany and Austria, and the emigration to London in 1938, in which he himself took a leading part. The book ends with Freud's death in London in September 1939, which Jones describes as the death of a realist. Throughout, Jones writes as both biographer and participant: admiring, but willing to record Freud's faults, often correcting Freud's own memory and the stories of others, and reading Freud's life in psychoanalytic terms. For decades it was the standard life of Freud, valued for the documents it first made public. Later critics, among them Erich Fromm, objected to its portrayal of Rank and Ferenczi as mentally disturbed and to its partisanship towards the dissenters, and historians have questioned some of its stories, such as Jones's account of the end of Anna O.'s treatment.