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Brenda Maddox is a well-known biographer who has entered the crowded field of the history of psychoanalysis with her new book, Freud's Wizard: Ernest Jones and the Transformation of Psychoanalysis.
Although not an analyst herself, Maddox is quite familiar with the psychoanalytic world. She claims that, for her, “one attraction of
Jones was the way his life touched the others about which I have written” (p. 2). These others are Nora (Mrs. James) Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, W. B. Yeats, and Rosalind Franklin, the “dark lady” of DNA. Ernest Jones had, of course, touched the lives of almost all psychoanalysts of his time and many others since then. He introduced psychoanalysis in England, facilitated its development in all English-speaking countries, and was for many years the most powerful person in the psychoanalytic world. His biography of Freud established him as “the principal historian of the psychoanalytic movement” (p. 268).
Writing the biography of such a man—and with a psychoanalytic readership in mind—must have been, for Maddox, a daunting task. She has succeeded, however, in overcoming many obstacles and producing an impressive biographical study of Jones's rise in the world of psychoanalysis with her diligent study of voluminous documents, which include, but are by no means limited to, Jones's personal correspondence with Freud (671 letters) and his extensive publications. In addition, Maddox interviewed a number of people, such as Jones's sons and daughter, consulted with many others, and systematically researched records pertinent to her subject's activities.
In intellectual history, the biographer must integrate at least three stories into one: the story of the subject's personal life, the story of the development of the subject's creativity, with its ups and downs, and the story of the social and intellectual environment within which the subject's life and creativity took place.
The aim of the biographer is to do justice to all three stories, but all too ofte