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Alfred Ernest Jones (1 January 1879 – 11 February 1958) was a British neurologist and psychoanalyst, and Sigmund Freud’s official biographer. Jones was the first English-speaking practitioner of psychoanalysis and became its leading exponent in the English-speaking world where, as President of both the British Psycho-Analytical Society and the International Psychoanalytic Association in the 1920s and 1930s, he exercised unmatched influence in the establishment of its organisations, institutions and publications.
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Jones was born in Gowerton (formerly Ffosfelin), an industrial village on the outskirts of Swansea, the son of a colliery engineer.
He was educated at Swansea Grammar School, Llandovery College, Cardiff University and University College London, where in 1901 he obtained a first-class honours degree in medicine and obstetrics, followed by an MD and membership of the Royal College of Physicians in 1903. He was particularly pleased to receive the University’s gold medal in obstetrics from his distinguished fellow-Welshman, Sir John Williams.
After obtaining his medical degrees Jones specialised in neurology and took a number of posts in London Hospitals. It was through his association with the surgeon Wilfred Trotter that Jones first heard of Freud’s work. Having worked together as surgeons at University College Hospital they had become close friends, with Trotter taking the role of mentor and confidant to his younger colleague. They had in common a wide-ranging interest in philosophy and literature, as well as a growing interest in Continental psychiatric literature and the new forms of clinical therapy it surveyed. By 1905 they were sharing accommodation above Harley Street consulting rooms with Jones’s sister, Elizabeth (later to become Trotter’s wife), installed as housekeeper. Jones, appalled at what he had seen of the institutionalised treatment of the mentally ill, began experimenting with hypnotic techniques in his clinical work.
It was in 1905 in a German psychiatric journal that Jones first encountered Freud’s writings, in the form of the famous Dora case-history.[1] It was thus he formed, as his autobiography records: “the deep impression of there being a man in Vienna who actually listened with attention to every word his patients said to him...a revolutionary difference from the attitude of previous physicians...” (Jones 1959 p159).
Unfortunately for Jones the medical establishment of Edwardian Britain was resolutely antagonistic to Freudian theory and in this context Jones’s early attempts to employ psychoanalytic insights in his clinical and research work proved less than circumspect. In 1906, employed as an inspector of schools for mentally handicapped children, he pursued his research interests in childhood sexuality during interviews with four children with a line of questioning that resulted in him facing trial over allegations of improper conduct. [2] In 1908, having demonstrated the repressed sexual memory underlying the hysterical paralysis of a young girl’s arm, he faced allegations from the girl’s parents and was forced to resign his hospital post.[3]
Jones’s first serious relationship was with Loe Kann, a wealthy Dutch émigré referred to him in 1906 after she had become addicted to morphine during treatment for a serious kidney condition. Their relationship lasted until 1913 and ended with Kann in analysis with Freud and Jones, at Freud's behest, with Sándor Ferenczi. [4]
A tentative romance with Anna Freud did not survive the disapproval of her father. Before her visit to Britain in the autumn of 1914, which Jones chaperoned, Freud advised: "She does not claim to be treated as a woman, being still far away from sexual longings and rather refusing man. There is an outspoken understanding between me and her that she should not consider marriage or the preliminaries before she gets two or three years older". (Letter of 22nd July 1914 (Paskauskas 1993)).
In 1917 Jones married the Welsh composer Morfydd Llwyn Owen. She died eighteen months later following complications from surgery for appendicitis.
Following some inspired matchmaking by his Viennese colleagues, in 1919 Jones met and married Katherine Jokl, a Jewish economics graduate from Moravia, who had been at school in Vienna with Freud’s daughters. In what proved to be a long and happy marriage the couple had four children, including the writer Mervyn Jones.
Whilst attending a congress of neurologists in Amsterdam in 1907, Jones met Carl Jung from whom he received a first-hand account of the work of Freud and his circle in Vienna. Confirmed in his judgement of the importance of Freud’s work, Jones joined Jung in Zurich to plan the inaugural Psychoanalytical Congress. This was held in 1908 in Salzburg where Jones met Freud for the first time. Jones then travelled to Vienna for further discussions with Freud and introductions to the members of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Thus began a personal and professional relationship which, to the acknowledged benefit of both, would survive the many dissensions and rivalries which marked the first decades of the psychoanalytic movement, and would last until Freud’s death in 1939.
With his career prospects in Britain in serious difficulty, Jones sought refuge in Canada in 1908, taking up teaching duties in the Department of Psychiatry of the University of Toronto (from 1911, as Associate Professor of Psychiatry). He also, in addition to his private psychoanalytic practice, worked as pathologist to the Toronto Asylum and Director of its psychiatric outpatient clinic. Following further meetings with Freud in 1909 at Clark University, Massachusetts, where Freud gave a series of lectures on psychoanalysis, and in Holland the following year, Jones set about forging strong working relationships with the nascent American psychoanalytic movement, giving some 20 papers or addresses to American professional societies at venues ranging from Boston, to Washington and Chicago. In 1910 he co-founded the American Psychopathological Association and the following year the American Psychoanalytic Association, serving as its first Secretary until 1913.
He also found the time for an intensive programme of writing and research, which produced the first of what were to be many significant contributions to psychoanalytic literature, notably monographs on Hamlet and On the Nightmare. A number of these were published in German in the main psychoanalytic periodicals published in Vienna and thereby served to secure his status in Freud's inner circle during the period of the latter's increasing estrangement from Jung. It was in this context that, in 1912, Jones initiated, with Freud's agreement, the formation of a Committee of loyalists charged with safeguarding the theoretical and institutional legacy of the psychoanalytic movement.[5] This development also served the more immediate purpose of isolating Jung and, with Jones in strategic control, eventually manoeuvring him out of the Presidency of the International Psychoanalytic Association, a post he had held since its inception. When Jung's resignation came in 1914, it was only the outbreak of war which prevented Jones taking his place.
On his return to London in 1913 Jones set up in practice as a psychoanalyst, founded the London Psychoanalytic Society and continued to write and lecture on psychoanalytic theory. A collection of his papers appeared as Papers on Psychoanalysis, the first comprehensive account of psychoanalytic theory and practice to be published in the English language.
By 1919, the year he founded the British Psychoanalytical Society, Jones could report proudly to Freud that psychoanalysis in Britain “stands in the forefront of medical, literary and psychological interest” (letter 27 January 1919 (Paskauskas 1993)). As President of the Society – a post he would hold until 1944 – Jones secured funding for and supervised the establishment in London of a Clinic offering subsidised fees and an Institute of Psychoanalysis which provided administrative, publishing and training facilities for the growing network of professional psychoanalysts.
Jones went on to serve two periods as President of the International Psychoanalytic Association from 1920 to1924 and 1932 to 1949. In 1920 he founded the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, serving as its editor until 1939. The following year he established the International Psychoanalytic Library, which published some 50 books under his editorship. Jones soon obtained from Freud rights to the English translation of his work and in 1924 the first two volumes of Freud's Collected Papers appeared in translations edited by Jones and supervised by Joan Riviere his former analysand and, at one stage, ardent suitor. After a period in analysis with Freud, Riviere worked with Jones as the translation editor of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis and then on the a working group Jones set up to plan and deliver James Strachey’s translations for the Standard Edition of Freud’s work.[6] Largely through Jones’s energetic advocacy, the British Medical Association officially recognised psychoanalysis in 1929. The BBC subsequently removed him from a list of speakers declared to be dangerous to public morality, and in the 1930s he and his colleagues made a series of radio broadcasts on psychoanalysis.
After Hitler took power in Germany Jones helped many displaced and endangered Jewish analysts to resettle in England and other countries. Following the Anschluss of March 1938, Jones flew into Vienna at considerable personal risk, to play a crucial role in negotiating and organising the emigration of Freud and his circle to London.[7]
After the end of the war Jones gradually relinquished his many official posts whilst continuing his psychoanalytic practice, writings and lecturing. The major undertaking of his final years was his monumental account of Freud’s life and work, published to widespread acclaim in three volumes between 1953 and 1957. In this he was ably assisted by his German-speaking wife, who translated much of Freud’s early correspondence and other archive documentation made available by Anna Freud. An uncompleted autobiography, Free Associations, was published posthumously in 1959.
Always proud of his Welsh origins, Jones became a member of the Welsh Nationalist Party, Plaid Cymru. He had a particular love of the Gower Peninsula, which he had explored extensively in his youth and which, following the purchase of a holiday cottage in Llanmadoc, became a regular holiday retreat for the Jones family. He was instrumental in helping secure its status in 1956, as the first region of the UK to be designated an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.
Both of Jones’s main leisure pursuits resulted in significant publications. A keen ice skater since his schooldays, Jones published an influential textbook on the subject (Jones 1931b). His passion for chess inspired a psychoanalytical study of the life of American chess genius Paul Morphy.[8]
Jones was made a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in 1942, Honorary President of the International Psychoanalytic Association in 1949 and an Honorary Doctor of Science (Wales) at Swansea University in 1954.
Jones died on 11 February 1958, and was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium. His ashes were buried in the grave of the oldest of his four children in the churchyard of St Cadoc's Cheriton on the Gower Peninsula.[9]
Maddox (2006) includes a comprehensive bibliography of Jones's writings.