Free Associations

Memories of a Psychoanalyst

Ernest Jones, Booker T. Washington

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351310826
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

First published in 1958, Free Associations is the story of the early life of Ernest Jones. It was prepared for publication by his son Mervyn, who contributed an epilogue covering the period from 1918 (when this book ends) through Jones's death in 1944. This new edition includes a reflective introduction by Mervyn Jones, in which he writes about Ernest Jones "as I could not write in 1958."

One of the pioneers in psychoanalysis, Ernest Jones was active in advancing the status as well as the development of the field. In the wider forum of public opinion, he made himself an advocate of the new science-the Huxley, he liked to say, to Freud's Darwin. Huxley had ranked below Darwin in creative originality, and had filled the role of the faithful and indispensably useful follower; and Mervyn Jones believes both Freud and Jones were pleased by the comparison. In addition to his important public and organizational roles (as president of the British and International Psychoanalytic Associations), Jones made significant contributions to psychoanalytic theory. When the Nazis invaded Vienna, he saved much of the assets and archives of psychoanalysis, at great personal risk, and made the arrangements for Freud to come to London.

In his introduction, Mervyn Jones presents a sometimes surprising portrait of a thoroughly conventional man in what was then an unconventional profession. He describes tensions and conflicts among the early Freudians, and situates Freudianism with other theories that laid claim to scientific truth in the late nineteenth century.

Free Associations presents an evocative picture of Wales and London at the turn of the century, and describes the developing profession of psychoanalysis. It is a dramatic story of success and failure, and of a young man and how he responded to the new, strange ideas of Freud. This book fills in our understanding of the history of psychoanalysis and its founders.

Chapter One

Origins

I WAS born, the first child and only son of my parents, on the first of January 1879, in the parish of Llwchwr, in a village called Rhosfelyn; the Great Western Railway had in 1852 rechristened it Gower Road, a name my father later got changed to the hybrid Gowerton. It is situate in the centre of Gwyr (Gower), the ancient kingdom between Swansea Bay and Caermarthen Bay, and is about six miles away from both Swansea and Llanelly, though the direct road between these towns does not pass through it.

It is the common experience of psycho-analysts that a patient intimates in the first hour of the treatment, and often in the very first sentence, the most important secrets of his life, although this is done in such a veiled way that it may take months or years of arduous work before it is possible to read the inner meaning of them. Were I in the position of such a patient, the opening sentences of this book could be put to a similar use. I know that the essential story of my life lies hidden in those sentences, though they need a minute examination to decipher it or even discern its elements. Let me see; it may prove worth while to follow this train of thought; to do so should at all events illustrate the psycho-analytical attitude of mind.

* * * * * *

Much of life consists in the gradual taming of the grandiloquent hopes and fantasies of infancy. Poignant lessons teach us of what little account we are in the scale of things, and much of increasing wisdom consists in the proper assimilation of them. How well Browning described this process: “. . . little by little he sees fit to forego claim after claim in the world, puts up with a less and less share of its good as his proper portion; and when the octogenarian asks barely a sup of gruel and a fire of dry sticks, and thanks you as for his full allowance and right in the common good of life,—hoping nobody may murder him,—he who began by asking and expecting the whole of us to bow down in worship to him,—why, I say he is advanced far onward, very far....”

One of my first lessons concerned my birthday. The blasts on the factory hooters at midnight, which I was always roused from sleep to hear, together with the general jubilation of New Year’s Day, seemed to me to be an appropriate recognition of the event; and I still recollect my shamefacedness at the age of four or five on learning that the world in its greeting was concerned with thoughts transcending my self-important personality. An after-echo of this came some ten years later when I observed that the date of my coming of age would make me one of the “first men” of the twentieth century—to paraphrase Heine’s similar remark about himself and the nineteenth century. Alas for the narcissism of childhood! Fortunate are those who can replace it by more solid grounds for self-satisfaction. To be the favourite child, as I felt I was—and my sisters showed much generosity in subscribing to this privilege—gives one much to overcome, and yet provides deep sources of confidence that help one in the task.

My mother had wished to give me the name of Myrddin, but my prosaic father cavilled at this and chose instead to name me after Queen Victoria’s second son, Alfred Ernest, Duke of Edinburgh. It was a decision not easy to forgive, and when I grew up I at least discarded the first of these unwelcome royal appellations. In compensation and in loyalty to my mother I called my eldest son, now a novelist, by the anglicised name Mervyn. But the name Ernest seems to accord well with my serious temperament.

My parents were both of pure Welsh descent. My mother was in every way Welsh, but my father knew little of the language and took a decidedly English view of life. That I should find worth mentioning his converting the name of my birthplace into an English hybrid is no doubt an echo of every child’s resentment at the fantasy of his father desecrating his mother; and I must confess to have never entirely succeeded in achieving a detached attitude towards the callous English acquiescence in assaults on the Celtic language and culture.

Gower itself played its part in my early thoughts. That ancient kingdom, then extending far beyond its present peninsular limits, once divided Glamorgan from Caermarthen, and it happened that my father’s ancestors came from the Glamorgan side of it, my mother’s from the Caermarthen. Gower has never been entirely absorbed by either county. Although it appears on the map as part of Glamorgan, and counts as such for parliamentary and legal purposes, having been joined to it in the sixteenth century, still it belongs (or did until a few years ago) to the diocese of St. David’s, not to that of the Glamorgan city of Llandaff, and registration of personal events took place in Caermarthen, not Glamorgan. My own birth, for instance, was registered in Llanelly, not Swansea; I was thus able to obtain a Caermarthen county scholarship at a public school and subsequently a Glamorgan county scholarship at the University.

I was deeply attached to both my parents and regarded myself, indeed rightly so, as a bond of union between them. In our sitting-room I used to sit on a little cane chair between them, symbolising both the desire to unite and, no doubt on a deeper level, to separate them; the chair has survived to be used by my grandchildren three-quarters of a century later. It was a happy solution of the Oedipus complex that has stood me in good stead throughout my life, for it brought with it an unusual capacity for double loyalties, with little tendency to divided ones. Not only was I faithful to both counties, but also to both countries—indeed, I should find it hard to say whether I have loved England or Wales more.

My professional life has similarly been marked by intense devotion to both medicine and psycho-analysis, two disciplines I have always wished to be in amicable relations with each other. I was born to be a doctor, and could not easily imagine myself in any other capacity. Medicine, with its intimate contact with humanity, has always seemed to me the meeting-point of scientific and humane concern, the centre of man’s most praiseworthy activities. The impelling motives for the pursuit of its study sooner or later override all the obstructions to knowledge, including even the delaying superstitions that the urgent clamour for immediate help has so often generated. It is no chance that when the Greek genius faltered at the threshold of scientific thought by disdaining the experimental method and enmeshing itself in the quandaries of philosophy, it was medical study alone that forced it into some relationship, however strained, with reality. Although our therapeutic powers are still feeble in comparison with what they shall sometime become, they are already based on a much more comprehensive knowledge of human realities than any other profession has any experience of—that of the legal and political professions, for instance, is flimsy by the side of it. So, in spite of my later discovery that many doctors very imperfectly shared my ideals, my admiration for the goals towards which medicine strives has never abated.

As to psycho-analysis, that again is a focal point where all the varied activities of the human mind come together—a key to the understanding of every fleeting thought, childish fantasy, and grotesque dream, as well as of all the customs and institutions by which men have expressed or codified their interests and needs. But when Freud proposed to separate psychoanalysis from medicine and to establish it as an independent discipline—in many ways a seductive idea—I successfully opposed this course by insisting on the reasons why it would lead to an impoverishment of both. On the contrary, by relating psycho-analysis more closely to medical biology, and by extending medicine so that it comprehends the mind as well as the body, we shall, in my opinion, arrive in time at a happy synthesis that will beneficially affect the most diverse fields of human activity. Perhaps indeed, in centuries to be, the medical psychologist may, like the priest of ancient times, come to serve as a source of practical wisdom and a stabilising influence in this chaotic world, whom the community would consult before embarking on any important social or political enterprise. Mere megalomania, it may be said. Perhaps, but it is my living faith none the less, and only our descendants will be able to say if it was a misplaced one.

Such threads run through life and affect small matters as well as great. I will trace this one in an entirely different region. One of the very useful vents my infantile curiosity found for its expression was a passion for topography. I do not regret it, since it resulted in my possessing a capacity for finding my direction and a knowledge of geography both considerably above the average. In my opening paragraph which serves as a text, stress is laid on several apparently trivial facts of topography. But they were not trivial to me. The identification of myself with Gower, as a unique province owing a double allegiance, fitted well into my world of fantasy, and the childish picture of myself as the Lord of Gower was as yet unclouded by the later discovery that this title was irrelevantly borne by at least two Scottish peers. The southern part of it was settled by Flemings, rapidly anglicised, in the early twelfth century—like Pembroke, it became known as Little England beyond Wales—and their descendants until quite recently kept within a sharply marked border, never intermarrying with the Welsh. This delectable foreign land of the south, with its entrancing bays and cliffs, gave me solace in my unhappy childhood days, which were many, and a sense of freedom from the pettinesses and restrictions I felt to be characteristics of Welsh life. From the age of nine I would often wander there with my dog for the whole day, and twenty to thirty miles was never too much to cover. Even more entrancing seemed the distant land of Devon (alike, even verbally, to Heaven), visible across the sea, and years later I could trace in my dreams the quaint wish that the Bristol Channel were narrowed to even less than its prehistoric river and would allow one to ford it to the Arcadian land beyond. Among these Gower cliffs, in 1823, the egregious Dean Buckland had discovered the first paleolithic skeleton in Europe, the so-called “Red Lady of Paviland”. I knew the story in childhood from my father, and also the later anti-Biblical developments. I must owe to this young Aurignacian prince of 2,500 years ago, for so he now seems to have been, both the beginnings of my theological doubts and my lasting absorption in anthropology and pre-history.

A friend once remarked to me that he always wished to be both south and west of wherever he happened to be at any moment, and I can well understand that wish. Indeed, I once put it into practice in what later proved to be a significant action. Returning once from Devon to London by a circuitous route I drove from Hampshire into the south-western part of Sussex. Something in the scenery and topography seized me, and on reaching London I wrote to some agents asking if they had any cottage for sale somewhere south-west of Midhurst. They had one, an early Jacobean cottage at Elsted, where I now live. I was at once taken by both it and its position, but I remember that what clinched the matter was the vendor’s remark that although otherwise in Sussex, Elsted was partly in Hampshire, its postal address being (then) “near Petersfield, Hants”. A district with a double allegiance: just the thing. Years later I acquired a villa at Mentone, in the dream—now alas a vanished one—of being able to retire there in my old age, and I knew that I was largely influenced in my choice by the facts that Mentone was an ancient independent locality, still preserving its own peculiar language, and is now a frontier town owing attachments to both France and Italy.

It was not long before I discovered with what undeviating accuracy my intuitions had unconsciously functioned in the choice of my future home. (I need hardly say that I acquired also a cottage in Gower, though only as a pied-à-terre.) The more I looked about me the more evident did it become that The Plat, as I christened it—adopting the old Sussex name by which its paddock was known locally—was in all the respects that emotionally mattered to me the only house in the whole of England that topographically duplicated my birthplace at Gowerton. Here are the facts—all of course known to me at the time, though not consciously appreciated—that bear out this hardly credible assertion. Both villages are three miles from the western end of a county and situate at the apex of a triangle of which the other points, in every case six miles distant, are the market towns, one in each county, on which they draw: Swansea and Llanelly, Midhurst and Petersfield. A wild plateau divides both from the sea to the south, some dozen miles away. And, incidentally, I could never understand how anyone can live near a sea that is not to the south of them: how do they do without the sun’s sparkling on it and the moon’s mysterious pathway? Well, there are only five counties in England where one can find a village three miles from the next county to the west and where the sea is on the south; and in only one of them, Sussex, is there the necessary plateau from which to envisage the homeland on one side and the sea on the other—not to speak of the characteristic relationship of the towns. I will not go into all the other details, the house itself on the south side of the road and looking to the north, and so on. The whole thing would be uncanny were one not familiar with the unerring way in which deep emotions direct life.

The stock from which I sprang is, I fancy, characteristic for those Welshmen who have managed to play a part outside their native land, so I will say something of it; what I have to narrate is based only on immediate knowledge, assisted, it is true, by several family Bibles in my possession, since I have never been concerned to institute any genealogical researches. Probably most readers will do well to skip these dry details. So far as I can judge, the direct influence of my parents seems to me more important mentally than what I can trace of hereditary agencies.

Of the patronymic sources I know little. My father’s paternal grandfather, Thomas Jones, was in charge of a colliery’s pit ponies, and migrated from Merthyr Tydfil to Swansea, where he worked in a livery stable, but, unlike Keats’s father in a similar situation, omitted to marry his master’s daughter; he was illiterate, as I know from the cross he affixed to his son’s indenture of apprenticeship. His son, John Jones, whom I just remember, was a self-employed carpenter. I am told that he had the habit of taking refuge from his wife’s tongue by immersing himself in the light literature, the counterpart of our detective stories, of the day, though, even so, she was apt to remove his “farthing dip” as an unnecessary extravagance, leaving the poor man in the dark. More complete, though temporary, escapes were afforded by embarking on long voyages, even round the world, as a ship’s carpenter, and I recall my fondness for the souvenirs of those voyages, huge tortoiseshells and the like. My grandmother certainly had a vivid personality. I saw nothing of her reputed shrewishness—though my mother told me she was a thorn in her flesh in the early days of her son’s marriage—partly because by then time had softened that aspect of her nature and partly because she allowed herself to show an affection for me which apparently she had been wont to check with her own children. The impression she left on me was that of an intelligent, kindly woman with a caustic turn to her speech and a devastatingly disillusioning vision of reality. She was given to expressing her views on life in proverbial sayings, a habit I seem to have acquired from her. She would, for instance, usually diminish the proportions of any family dispute with the words: “It will be all the same in a hundred years.”

Her father, Joseph Beddoe, belonged to a branch of the Shropshire Beddoe family who had settled in Gorseinon (midway between Swansea and Llanelly) in the seventeenth century. At the end of the eighteenth century, one of them was drowned with his son when ferrying across the River Llwchwr; it always struck me as a particularly unmerited fate, since they were on their way to a chapel service to which they had piously walked several miles. Her mother, Ann Rees by name, came from Old Walls in the Welsh part of Gower. I well remember this old lady and the sponge cakes I used to buy for her as a delicacy in her toothless old age. She had been married to a weaver from Penmaen, also in Gower, but he had died at the age of forty-nine, so that she had to spend thirty-seven years as a widow; her daughter was to pass forty-three years in that state. Undeterred by her fate, she migrated to Swansea to be near her only daughter, whom my grandfather married in the same year, and took over the brewing department of the Red Cow in the High Street. Her mother, Margaret David of Llanrhidian, lived to be eighty-four, she herself lived to be eighty-one, and her daughter to be ninety-one. She was born in 1808, and so could relate to me memories of the Napoleonic wars. She of course never saw the great man herself but, incidentally, many years later I met another old lady who had—in Torbay.

Some of the Beddoe attributes appear to belong to dominant genes, for they have faithfully manifested themselves down the generations, and I have felt justified in giving the name to each of my sons. I did so in a vain endeavour to lessen the handicap my patronymic ancestry had laid on me. It is statistically demonstrable that the odds are heavy against anyone achieving distinction in life if he has to share his surname with hundreds of thousands of his contemporaries. Among the many handicaps that the Welsh share with the Jews, such as their outworn attachment to the Old Testament, not the least was the acquisition of surnames in unfortunate circumstances; and one can foresee a time when, if these attributes are to fulfil their proper function, an extensive re-naming will have to take place. To get back to the immediate theme: I have always fancied that if my father and I inherited an I.Q. higher than that of our relatives it probably came, via his mother, from the Beddoe stock. At one time I even toyed with the idea of hyphenating the name with my surname, but Freud dissuaded me on the ground of its being confusing.

My maternal heredity was almost as uninspiring. My mother’s paternal grandfather, John Lewis, was a mason at Llandilo—the scene now shifts to the county of Caermarthen; he had come there from Llangefelach, once famous for its animal fair and now the site of an enormous steel works. Her father, Benjamin Lewis, who died when I was nine years old, had moved to Swansea. He was a competent architect and contractor, building railway stations, docks, and other constructions, and he tried to get me to follow in his footsteps by presenting me with his tomes on architecture. His biblical first name, so common in Wales, led to a curious contretemps in the time of the Nazi regime. His niece was married to a German in Berlin, the Herr Schmidt who managed the Adlon Hotel. The Nazis insisted that her maiden name, Lewis (like Louis, a corruption of the very Teutonic Ludwig), must be a corruption of Levi, and the fact of her grandfather being called David and her uncle Benjamin seemed to clinch the matter of her supposed Jewish origin. She had to appeal to me to verify her descent.

My grandfather was an attractive but eccentric person, with an all-or-nothing attitude towards life. He had a deep suspicion of doctors and their ways, and on the rare occasions when he was persuaded to listen to one he would say with a sigh of irritation: “Well, I’ll give them another chance”, and drink down the whole bottle of medicine at one gulp; the results at times confirmed his worst suspicions. Fifty years after his death his daughter, my mother’s only sister, followed his example with a lethal result. She had been given some anti-thrombotic medicine for purpura in the skin, swallowed the whole of it, and promptly died of a pontine haemorrhage. Once my grandfather’s wife commissioned him to buy some wallpaper for a bedroom that wanted repapering. In the course of the morning a van appeared and to her great dismay the unloading continued until one of their two living-rooms was chock-full of the material her obedient, or contumacious, husband had requisitioned—my earliest experience of sabotage. In his later years he took to drinking more than was good for him, and it became one of my duties—for I often stayed with these grandparents in their home in Swansea—to fetch him home from his haunts of revelry in the local pub—a summons he never failed to obey. This conduct saddened my saintly mother and, pursued by the fear, which had been increased by injudicious reading on the subject of heredity, that this trait would reappear in her son, she tried hard to bind me to total abstinence. Never having perceived in myself any sign of this dreaded inheritance, I saw no necessity for such an extreme measure. My grandfather and I were greatly attached to each other and my father must have thought he spoiled me. At all events, I recall his strongly disapproving what he considered the precocious proceeding of my grandfather replacing my petticoats by a pair of knickerbockers at the early age of four. My grandfather had a long stride and I evidently imitated him in this as well as no doubt in other ways, for I was much surprised in my early teens at being stopped by a stranger in a street in Swansea with the remark: “You must be a grandson of Benjamin Lewis, for you walk just like him.”

My maternal grandmother was a Miss Jones, who married a Mr. Lewis, whilst my mother reversed the proceeding—not a difficult feat in Wales. She was gentle, refined, and had some aesthetic appreciation, but with a softer type of intellect than my paternal grandmother; she tried to instil into me various medical superstitions of the herbalist variety which my more robust Beddoe blood promptly rejected. She used to tell me tales of the Rebecca riots of the eighteen-forties and of the alarm felt when the rioting approached Swansea. Her family came from Llandybie, near Llandilo, and her mother, Ann Morris by name, was the only member of my immediate ancestry with some pretension to being “well-born”; the town of Morriston is named after her family. I was told that she had eloped with my great-grandfather, who was merely an employee on the estate. I possess a photograph of her in her fifties with her granddaughter, my mother, standing at her knee.

My maternal grandmother’s father and brother, together with a friend called Davies, were drawn by the Aust...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• Preface
• 1. Origins
• 2. Boyhood
• 3. Adolescence
• 4. Hospital Student Days
• 5. Success
• 6. Failure
• 7. Harley Street
• 8. Approach to Psycho-Analysis
• 9. Life in Canada
• 10. The Psycho-Analytical “Movement”
• 11. Return to London: Wartime
• 12. Epilogue, by Mervyn Jones