Ernest Jones

Ernest Jones (1879–1958) was a Welsh neurologist and psychoanalyst who became the principal organizer of the international psychoanalytic movement and, after Freud’s death, his official biographer. He attended the first Freudian congress in Salzburg in 1908, founded and later rebuilt the British Psychoanalytical Society, and in 1912 proposed the creation of the Secret Committee — a small inner circle that coordinated Freud’s movement during its most contentious years. Jones ran the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) through the Nazi period and the Second World War. He sided with Melanie Klein in her disputes with Anna Freud, helped negotiate Freud’s exit from Vienna in 1938, and participated in the translation decisions that shaped how English-speaking analysts understood Freud. His three-volume biography of Freud (1953–1957) fixed the image of Freud as a solitary genius — an account later historians have contested.

Life and Context

Jones was among the twelve non-Austrian, non-Swiss attendees at the first Freudian congress, held in Salzburg in April 1908. Makari notes that these twelve men, who came from Budapest, Berlin, New York, and London, would each become indispensable to the international spread of Freudian thought.(Makari, George, 2008) Jones was one of the few non-Jews in Freud’s circle, a fact Freud explicitly valued: having gentile advocates like Jones helped insulate psychoanalysis against the charge that it was merely a “Jewish science” with no claim on broader European medicine.(Makari, George, 2008)

Jones trained as a neurologist and became a practicing analyst in London. His role was primarily organizational and political rather than theoretical; unlike Ferenczi, Abraham, or Rank, he is not associated with major clinical innovations. What he supplied was administrative skill, institutional loyalty, and the organizational energy to keep the movement intact across decades of schism, exile, and war.

The Secret Committee

In 1912, Jones proposed to Freud that a small, secret inner circle be formed to protect psychoanalytic doctrine after the impending break with Jung. Freud was enthusiastic, adding emphasis on the group’s secrecy that Jones had not originally specified, and imagining the members as a band of loyal guardians — Jones compared them to Charlemagne’s paladins guarding the kingdom of their master.(Makari, George, 2008)

Before the committee met, Jones, Ferenczi, and Rank had discussed the instability of the movement and agreed that it was caused by unanalyzed analysts whose personal neuroses corrupted their theoretical conclusions. Their solution was ceaseless self-analysis and personal loyalty; Ferenczi went further, proposing that a small group be analyzed by Freud himself to create a purified leadership.(Makari, George, 2008) The Secret Committee first met formally on May 25, 1913, with Jones, Ferenczi, Karl Abraham, Otto Rank, and Hanns Sachs. Its first act was to circulate Ferenczi’s critique of Jung, which concluded that Jung’s deviations were radical and that no reconciliation was possible.(Makari, George, 2008)

After the purge of Jung and Adler, Abraham, Ferenczi, Rank, and Jones adopted what Makari calls “openly subservient stances” toward Freud. Jones was among those who understood that any theoretical divergence from psychosexuality risked exile from the movement.(Makari, George, 2008)

Organizational Role

Jones’s organizational work covered several fronts across his career.

In London, he disbanded the London Psychoanalytical Society in 1919 specifically to expel members with ties to Jung, then reconstituted it immediately as the British Psychoanalytical Society.(Makari, George, 2008) This move was characteristic: Jones treated organizational structures as tools for enforcing theoretical orthodoxy. He then became editor of the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis and in that role wielded significant influence over what appeared in print.

When Wilhelm Reich became a political liability — publicly arguing that psychoanalysis was inherently radical at a time when the movement was desperate to avoid being labeled Marxist or Jewish — Anna Freud wrote directly to Jones, who was then IPA president, asking him to expel Reich. Jones executed the expulsion at the Lucerne Congress in 1934.(Makari, George, 2008) Reich later claimed his expulsion was about theoretical disagreements over the death drive, but Makari’s evidence establishes that the grounds were explicitly political: Ferenczi himself called the move “absolutely necessary to establish our political nonpartisanship.”

Jones’s accommodation of the Nazis followed Hitler’s rise in spring 1933, when the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute expelled its Jewish members and transferred leadership to Aryan analysts Felix Boehm and Carl Müller-Braunschweig.(Makari, George, 2008) Jones accepted this strategy of accommodation, hoping to preserve psychoanalysis in Germany.(Makari, George, 2008) The expelled leftist analysts covertly organized under Otto Fenichel’s “Rundbriefe” network from Oslo.(Makari, George, 2008) [GAP: The original paragraph claimed the Berlin Institute was dissolved and incorporated into Göring’s institute in July 1936, but this is not supported by the cited card.]

At the lay analysis debate of 1926 and after, Jones positioned himself against Freud. Freud had argued that medical training was unnecessary for analysts and should not be required; Jones bluntly called psychoanalysis a “medical organization and discipline” and characterized Freud’s position as “emotional, extreme, and absurd.” Jones was overruled by a majority of younger analysts, but the American and British societies ultimately moved in Jones’s direction.(Makari, George, 2008)

When the Anschluss came in March 1938 and Vienna fell to the Nazis, Jones worked alongside Princess Marie Bonaparte and the American ambassador William Bullitt to secure Freud’s release and exit. Freud left Vienna on June 4, 1938, owed his freedom in part to Jones’s diligent work on his behalf.(Makari, George, 2008)

At the 1938 Paris IPA Congress — the last before the war — Jones revealed a crisis: the American Psychoanalytic Association had sent a thirty-seven-page document effectively demanding that the IPA dissolve as an administrative body, reduce itself to a scientific congress, and end the dispute over lay analysis. Jones had to manage this threat to the international organization’s survival.(Makari, George, 2008)

The Klein-Anna Freud Dispute

[GAP: Jones’s consistent alignment with Klein across multiple 1920s–1930s disputes] In May 1927, the British Psychoanalytical Society convened a two-day symposium to challenge Anna Freud’s work on child analysis.(Makari, George, 2008) Klein opened with a thirty-two-page attack; then Joan Riviere, Nina Searl, Ella Sharpe, Edward Glover, and Jones added their critiques.(Makari, George, 2008) Their critiques, running over fifty pages, appeared in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis.(Makari, George, 2008)

Jones also communicated his objections to Freud directly, writing to tell him that he disagreed with Anna’s work — and attributing her positions to her “imperfectly analyzed resistances,” a neurotic dimension of her personality that, Jones cryptically added, he could prove “in detail.” This was a particularly pointed attack: using the psychoanalytic framework to pathologize disagreement rather than engage with it on its merits.(Makari, George, 2008)

By 1936, Makari describes Jones as “the most powerful patron in organized psychoanalysis” and identifies the English school — led by Klein along with Joan Riviere, Susan Isaacs, James Strachey, and Jones — as one of the two main rival camps, the other being the Viennese ego psychologists around Anna Freud.(Makari, George, 2008)

Biographer of Freud

When the London blitz began, the Kleinians fled to the countryside and Jones retreated to his house in Sussex; the Viennese analysts, constrained as alien immigrants and unable to leave London freely, attended British Society meetings and at times formed a majority in his absence (Makari, George, 2008). At the 1949 IPA Congress in Zurich, at least fifteen members murdered by the Nazis were memorialized, along with the founding generation. Of the original group that had met in Salzburg in 1908, only Jones and Eduard Hitschmann survived.(Makari, George, 2008) By that congress, the IPA had grown to eight hundred members, over half American; Jones announced applications from twenty new societies.(Makari, George, 2008)

Jones had also, in 1924, been centrally involved in one of the most consequential decisions in the history of psychoanalytic translation: working with Joan Riviere, he chose to render Freud’s Ich/ Über-Ich/ Es as “ego,” “super-ego,” and “id.”(Makari, George, 2008) This decision overrode the literal “I/Over-I/It” preferred by figures like John Rickman.(Makari, George, 2008) The use of the medical-sounding Latin “id” for Groddeck and Freud’s “It” was a deliberate medicalization that shaped the entire subsequent English-speaking psychoanalytic tradition.(Makari, George, 2008)

Fenichel’s 1934 encyclopedic synthesis — an attempt to preserve the whole field before its European institutions collapsed — listed Jones among the major contributors whose work had to be integrated: Freud, Abraham, Rank, Jung, Jones, Ferenczi, Alexander, and many others.(Makari, George, 2008)

After the war, Jones joined the group — which included Anna Freud, Ernst Kris, and Kurt Eissler — who propagated what Makari calls a self-justifying mythology: the legend of Freud as a solitary genius who created psychoanalysis in “splendid isolation, unaided by contemporaries and attacked by prigs and rebellious followers who often suffered from grave mental illness.” Makari’s own book is, in part, a rebuttal of this mythology, arguing that psychoanalysis was genuinely a collective intellectual enterprise shaped by dozens of contributors.(Makari, George, 2008)

The three-volume Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (1953–1957) was the primary vehicle for this portrait. As official biographer with privileged access to the archives and to Freud’s family, Jones shaped the public record for decades.

See Also

• sigmund-freud
• sandor-ferenczi
• melanie-klein
• anna-freud
• karl-abraham
• otto-rank
• wilhelm-reich
• Secret Committee
• British Psychoanalytical Society
• International Psychoanalytical Association

Sources

All claims draw on evidence cards from:

• Makari, G. (2008). Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis. New York: HarperCollins. [Source ID: makari-revolutioninmind-2008]
• Shorter, E. (1997/1998). A History of Psychiatry. [Source ID: shorter-historypsychiatry-1998] — Jones mentioned as historical figure; no substantive claims sourced here.
• Porter, R. (1997). The Greatest Benefit to Mankind. [Source ID: porter-greatestbenefit-1997] — Jones mentioned peripherally; no substantive claims sourced here.
• Scull, A. (2015). Madness in Civilization. [Source ID: scull-madnesscivilization-2015] — Jones mentioned peripherally; no substantive claims sourced here.
• Denham, J. (2013). Herbal Medicine in the 19th Century. [Source ID: denham-herbal-medicine-19thc-2013] — An “Ernest Jones” appears in ch02 as a Chartist politician (1819–1869), not the psychoanalyst; no usable claims.

Editorial Notes

Gaps the encyclopaedia compiler flagged for future evidence work, collected from inline markers in the body and frontmatter.

Sources