Subterranean Histories: The Dissemination of Freud's Works into the British Discourse on Psychological Medicine, 1904–1911

Abstract

In his late historical and autobiographical writings (the late writings) Ernest Jones makes two interrelated claims. The first, which he passes off as an historical fact, is that by 1904 there were ‘three sources of information available to [him]’ about Freud ( Jones, 1945b , p. 9). The second, which he makes by way of an autobiographical statement, is that he was already practising ‘the new therapy’ of psychoanalysis by 1906. Contemporaneous sources challenge the unspoken assumptions that run through Jones's late writings: that there was little or no discussion of Freud's ideas in Britain between 1904, when Jones claims he first started reading Freud, and November 1913 when he founded the London Psycho-Analytic Society. For reasons difficult to fathom Jones's version of history has been accepted almost without question. Lifting Jones's historical and autobiographical veils reveals a very different story: that when Jones first returned from Canada, in 1911, there was already a vibrant debate concerning the merits, or otherwise, of the new Freudian psychology and there were a number of doctors already treating patients with psychoanalysis or its variants. The paper concludes with a re-examination of Jones's relationship with M.D. Eder.