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Falling for Freud, a review of Freud’s Wizard: The Enigma of Ernest Jones by Brenda Maddox (2006), John Murray, London

William A. Frosch¹

Weill Cornell Medical College, New York, New York, USA

¹Correspondence: E-mail: wafrosc{at}med.cornell.edu

IF THERE WERE a new reality television program about choosing your own biographer, Brenda Maddox would be the clear winner. Since turning her hand to biography, she has produced a series of lucid prize-winning books about remarkable people. Her curiosity is wide-ranging: her subjects have included Norah Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Rosalind Franklin, and Prime Minister "Maggie" (Thatcher). She has now turned her attention to Ernest Jones (1879–1958), neurologist, psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and biographer of Sigmund Freud. Brenda Maddox has written a biography worthy of Ernest Jones’s most noteworthy achievement: his three-volume biography of Freud. She also makes it clear that Jones spent his life skating on thin moral ice. It happens that Jones was also an accomplished skater: in 1931, Jones published The Elements of Skating, in which he described the "ravishing experience of exultantly skiing the earth." and gave a lesson on "the art of falling." It is posterity’s good luck that he fell for Freud.

Jones was a small, dark, and feisty Welshman from an upwardly mobile family living in industrial Wales. He epitomized what was then thought of as the short dark "Iberian strain" of the Welsh as opposed to the tall blond "Celtic strain." If his Welshness became more marked over time, he came by it naturally. His great-grandfather Jones tended pit ponies in the coal mines, his maternal grandfather was a ship’s carpenter, and his father rose from clerk to accountant and general secretary of a large steel company near Swansea.

Jones was smart and hard-working, and did well at school. Sharing the ubiquitous, "Jones" name with many others in his class, he became "Jones VI" in the school records. Scholarships moved him ahead, and inspired by the family doctor, he entered medical school. He started his studies in Cardiff. While there he began his series of brushes with authority. He moved to London’s University College Hospital for his clinical training. He and his friends studied and played hard. On the one hand, he went to lectures by Joseph Lister, the father of antiseptic surgery; on the other, he twice spent a night in jail as a result of his rowdy behavior.

Perhaps in consequence, Jones’s early and continuing interest was the behavior of others. He obtained a clinical assistantship at the National Hospital in Queen’s Square. There, he worked with Bradford and Beever, and was influenced by the work of John Hughlings Jackson. He also began to publish, in Lancet, Brain, the British Journal of Children’s Diseases, and the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease. His papers dealt with such topics as hemiplegia in vascular lesions, hereditary spastic paraplegia, a technique for counting cells in the spinal fluid, and alcoholic cirrhosis in children. Although his teachers liked and respected him, he was not always an easy colleague. Decades later, he admitted that he had been "opinionated, tactless, conceited, or inconsiderate." As he began to work as a young physician in various institutions, these qualities created difficulties. The North-Eastern Hospital for Children asked him to resign. He did not get an expected appointment to the National Hospital. Of 13 jobs applied for, he received 9 rejections and only 4 acceptances, and these were for part-time jobs. In addition to his awkward and irascible nature, his Welsh origins may also have played a role: the Welsh, like the Jews in England at the time, were considered outsiders and not quite right socially.

While working at several jobs, coaching for examinations, and public lecturing, Jones was introduced to the work of Freud and psychoanalysis by Wilfred Trotter, a close friend and colleague. As early as 1905 or 1906 Jones was using hypnosis in a version of the "cathartic" method. He eagerly read James Jackson Putnam, then head of neurology at the Massachusetts General Hospital, on his use of Freud’s method in cases of hysteria.

Jones was then charged with indecently exposing himself to several children at a school for retarded children where he was employed. In an anticipation of the Monica Lewinsky dress episode, a table cloth from the examining room was produced that had several stains that "... were of such a character that they should not have been there." Nonetheless, he was acquitted; no doubt because it was a case of his word those of against mentally retarded children. Maddox cautiously concludes: "not proven."

Continuing to skate on thin ice, Jones went abroad. He met Jung at a meeting, studied with Emil Kraepelin and Alois Alzheimer, and visited Jung at the Burgholzli where he also met A. A. Brill. However, after another accusation of sexual indiscretion, English medicine turned its back to him—when he returned, no institution would offer him the work he desperately needed. Fortunately, despite his difficulties, his obvious talents led Sir William Osler, newly appointed Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford, to strongly recommend him for a job in Osler’s home ground, Canada—Osler said that Ontario would overlook "a great opportunity if it did not avail itself of the services of this young man." They did.

Although Jones and his entourage (described by him as his harem, the group included his common-law wife, her maid who would later become his mistress, and his two sisters) had looked forward to the move it proved disappointing. To Jones, Canada was culturally unsophisticated and prudish. He did use the opportunity to travel in the U.S., where he met the local CNS boffins: meeting Putnam, Clark, Adolph Meyer, William James, Franz Boas, and, once again, A. A. Brill. He also was able to return to Europe each summer where he met with Freud and soon became a part of the central group surrounding the Viennese master. Jones’s publications moved to psychoanalytic topics—he produced a paper in 1910 on the meaning of Hamlet’s indecisiveness (Laurence Olivier later consulted him when preparing to play the role), and he also produced the first book-length explication of psychoanalysis in English (1912).

Increasing New World concern with the explicit sexuality of the theory, and, once again, a patient’s accusation of improper behavior resulted in increasing unhappiness for the Joneses in Canada. They returned to Europe. Mrs. Jones entered analysis with Freud, and switched her affection to another Jones (referred to by Jones VI, as Jones II). Jones returned to London where he began a private psychoanalytic practice. He also continued to spread the gospel of psychoanalysis, and considered himself the T. H. Huxley to Freud’s Darwin. Behind his back he was sometimes described as "Freud’s rottweiler." Jones relished mastery and control. As he wrote in his book on skating, the aim was to acquire "... control over every fibre [sic] of the body ..." He started journals, organized societies, and mediated in the recurring internecine professional battles, all while continuing to publish and to lecture (including the inaugural address at the opening of Columbia University’s Psychiatric Institute). He shepherded the great, even if flawed, complete translation of Freud’s works. Jones was loved by women. He seemed to understand the answer to Freud’s question "Was will das Weib?"—"What does Woman want?" His answer appears to have been understanding. One wrote to him saying how much "... put aside yourself to help another struggling creature. .... One simply sits at your feet in matters of mind, has to bow down & wonder at your grasp..." Others told him how they felt instantly understood. Finally, in his early forties, he found true and lasting love and children. He appears to have come off the ice. Perhaps his finest moment was his flight to Vienna to rescue Freud and his family after Hitler moved in. Jones was held for a time by the Gestapo, but talked himself out of custody. Then, using all his accumulated diplomatic connections, he succeeded in obtaining permission for Freud to leave. After returning to London with the Freuds, he continued to coordinate a successful rescue of the psychoanalysts remaining in Europe and helped settle them around the world, in several cities in the States, in South America, and elsewhere.

His final and ultimate achievement was his magisterial three-volume biography of Freud. With the permission of the family, he had access to their recollections and to the family’s accumulated papers. Coupled with decades of immersion in the developing field and with personal knowledge of the important participants, he was uniquely equipped for the task. In addition, he wrote well and simply—he not only outlined Freud’s life, but also explicated the developing and changing theory in language all could understand. The first volume sold out in two weeks, quickly appeared on the best-seller lists, and was widely and enthusiastically reviewed. Lionel Trilling said at the beginning of his review in The New York Times, "It would be difficult to say too much in praise of the first of three volumes ..." When the final volume appeared, Trilling wrote, again in The New York Times, "... that the completed book is what the two earlier volumes promised it would be—one of the important documents in the cultural history of our time."

As Maddox herself notes, no biography can last for all time. As she points out, the 1951 biography of Maynard Keynes omitted mention of his homosexuality out of consideration of his family; and Ellman treated James Joyce’s brother gently because he had provided access to valuable material. Jones’s biography of Freud has had its necessary emendations and additions, but lives on as the classic treatment of its subject. As Janet Malcolm has put it, a biography is a combination of what the biographer has learned and what she is willing or able to tell. Nonetheless, absent a new-found cache of letters, diary entries, or court documents, I believe that Maddox’s life of Ernest Jones will live on as the Life of Jones: turbulent and tumultuous, always intense and vivid, energetic and—yes —loving.

Maddox’s book has the appropriate scholarly appendages: thorough notes; an extensive bibliography including a list of works by Jones himself; a detailed index and, among many other photographs, a charming illustration of how to perform the figure "Left Forward Outside" on ice, without falling.

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FOOTNOTES

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