Ernest Jones. Freud's Alter Ego.: By Vincent Brome. London: Caliban, 1982, 250 pp., £12.

Ernest Jones was a passionate man who lived and loved life to the fullest. When questioning himself, like a good psychoanalyst should, about his motives for writing Free Associations, his autobiographical account of the "Memories of a Psychoanalyst," a rather unexpected answer came to him: "Gratitude for life." Experiencing a deep need to say so, to tell someone so, and to thank someone, Jones tells us he indulged the illusion of prolonging that life by printed pages that might survive his bodily dissolution. Yet Jones recognized that even such a candid confession of his deepest motives for gratification—one might say of his narcissistic fantasies of immortal joy—did not justify his autobiographical effort. That justification he found in having assisted at and recorded certain scientific events to which, he was persuaded, history would ascribe "a very considerable importance" in the development of human thought. The autobiographical record itself thus became an expression of this gratitude (Jones, 1959, p. 9).

Indeed, while Jones' lust for life, especially his sexual and love life, may seem to have drawn excessive attention from his contemporaries as well as from his current biographer, his life found meaning and fulfillment only in his passionate dedication to psychoanalysis: "To me it is clear," he wrote to Freud, "that I owe my career, my livelihood, my position, and my capacity of happiness in marriage—in short everything—to you and the work you have done" (Clark, 1980, p. 260). This dedication to Freud and to psychoanalysis found its triumphant expression in the truly crowning achievement of his life—almost universally recognized as one of the outstanding biographies of our age—his monumental The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud. His aim in this work, Jones says, was "simply to record the main facts of Freud's life while they are still accessible, and—a more ambitious