Freud’s Wizard
By Brenda Maddox (2006)
1. As a young psychoanalyst practicing in London, Ernest Jones was so fascinated by Sigmund Freud’s early, as-yet-untranslated writings that he hired a tutor to improve his German. “Here was a man who was seriously interested in investigating the mind,” Jones noted. Jones soon met Freud and became his most fervent disciple in the English-speaking world. Brenda Maddox, the late American biographer who spent much of her life in London, vividly chronicles Jones’s adventures and misadventures. The diminutive Welshman was, as one female patient-turned-psychoanalyst put it, “irresistible to women.” He was also repeatedly mired in sex scandals. But, impressed by Jones’s prodigious efforts on behalf of psychoanalysis in both Britain and Canada, Freud wrote off such episodes as confirmation of his concept of “transference,” whereby a patient redirects her feelings for someone else toward her therapist. Upon returning to London, Jones served as the president of the British Psychoanalytical Society and the International Psychoanalytical Association. He oversaw the publication in English of a vast body of literature about psychoanalysis. Most important, he helped persuade Freud to flee Vienna after Nazi Germany’s takeover of Austria in 1938 and arranged entry permits to Britain for Freud, his family and several other Jewish members of his entourage.
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