The Complete Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Ernest Jones, 1908-1939

Sigmund Freud, Ernest Jones

Harvard University Press, 1993 - Psychology - 836 pages

Soon after their first meeting in 1908, Freud's future biographer, Ernest Jones, initiated a correspondence with the founder of psychoanalysis that would continue until Freud's death in London in 1939. Jones, a Welsh-born neurologist, would become a principal player in the development of psychoanalysis in England and the United States. This volume makes available from British and American archives nearly seven hundred previously unpublished letters, postcards, and telegrams, the vast majority of the three-decade correspondence between Freud and his admiring younger colleague. These letters and notes, dashed off almost compulsively in the odd moments of busy professional lives in Toronto, Vienna, and London, in transit between meetings, or on holidays on the Continent, provide a lively account of the early years of the psychoanalytic movement and its fortunes during the turbulent interwar period. The reader is invited to share in the domestic and international news of the day, to make the acquaintance of the prominent personalities among the first generation of Freud's followers, and to witness the drama of complex rivalries and conflicting loyalties - including the personal and intellectual rupture between Freud and Jung, and Jones's unrelenting effort to maneuver politically "behind the scenes" in order to position himself within Freud's inner circle. Present in the correspondence also are the women who in differing ways touched the lives of both men and influenced their work - Loe Kann, Joan Riviere, Melanie Klein, and Anna Freud. While charting the progress of a personal friendship, this correspondence offers glimpses of the darker events of the time - the last days of theAustro-Hungarian Empire, the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the rise of Nazism in Europe. Even though on a professional level the two correspondents differed on a striking array of issues - such as the theory of anxiety, the death and aggressive instincts, child analysis, female sexuality, and lay analysis - their letters are an affirmation of the intellectual and emotional bonds between these two very different men, who, as Jones put it so poignantly in his last letter to Freud, had "both made a contribution to human existence - even if in very different measure".

Contents

• Preface: vii
• Introduction by Riccardo Steiner: xxi
• 1922g Some Problems of Adolescence Read before a joint meeting of the Gen: 13
• 395: 95
• 114115: 114
• 116127: 116
• 130139: 130
• 168175: 168
• 207226: 179
• 142153: 250
• 1923b The Nature of AutoSuggestion Read before the Medical Section of: 293
• 3149: 320
• 338: 338
• 34: 481
• 496498: 496
• List of Correspondence: 773
• References: 795
• 356: 797
• 1926b The Psychology of Religion Read before the Tenth International Con: 805
• Glossary: 821

About the author

Sigmund Freud was the founder of psychoanalysis, simultaneously a theory of personality, a therapy, and an intellectual movement. He was born into a middle-class Jewish family in Freiburg, Moravia, now part of Czechoslovakia, but then a city in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. At the age of 4, he moved to Vienna, where he spent nearly his entire life. In 1873 he entered the medical school at the University of Vienna and spent the following eight years pursuing a wide range of studies, including philosophy, in addition to the medical curriculum. After graduating, he worked in several clinics and went to Paris to study under Jean-Martin Charcot, a neurologist who used hypnosis to treat the symptoms of hysteria. When Freud returned to Vienna and set up practice as a clinical neurologist, he found orthodox therapies for nervous disorders ineffective for most of his patients, so he began to use a modified version of the hypnosis he had learned under Charcot. Gradually, however, he discovered that it was not necessary to put patients into a deep trance; rather, he would merely encourage them to talk freely, saying whatever came to mind without self-censorship, in order to bring unconscious material to the surface, where it could be analyzed. He found that this method of free association very often evoked memories of traumatic events in childhood, usually having to do with sex. This discovery led him, at first, to assume that most of his patients had actually been seduced as children by adult relatives and that this was the cause of their neuroses; later, however, he changed his mind and concluded that his patients' memories of childhood seduction were fantasies born of their childhood sexual desires for adults. (This reversal is a matter of some controversy today.) Out of this clinical material he constructed a theory of psychosexual development through oral, anal, phallic and genital stages. Freud considered his patients' dreams and his own to be "the royal road to the unconscious." In The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), perhaps his most brilliant book, he theorized that dreams are heavily disguised expressions of deep-seated wishes and fears and can give great insight into personality. These investigations led him to his theory of a three-part structure of personality: the id (unconscious biological drives, especially for sex), the superego (the conscience, guided by moral principles), and the ego (the mediator between the id and superego, guided by reality). Freud's last years were plagued by severe illness and the rise of Nazism, which regarded psychoanalysis as a "Jewish pollution." Through the intervention of the British and U.S. governments, he was allowed to emigrate in 1938 to England, where he died 15 months later, widely honored for his original thinking. His theories have had a profound impact on psychology, anthropology, art, and literature, as well as on the thinking of millions of ordinary people about their own lives. Freud's daughter Anna Freud was the founder of the Hampstead Child Therapy Clinic in London, where her specialty was applying psychoanalysis to children. Her major work was The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense (1936).

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Complete Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Ernest Jones, 1908-1939; Volume 1 of Briefwechsel Sigmund Freud, Ernest Jones, 1908-1939; Psychoanalytic electronic publishing
• Authors: Sigmund Freud, Ernest Jones
• Editor: R. Andrew Paskauskas
• Illustrated by: Ernest Jones
• Contributor: Ernest Jones
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: Harvard University Press, 1993
• ISBN: 0674154231, 9780674154230
• Length: 836 pages
• Subjects: Psychology / General; Psychology / Movements / Psychoanalysis