Ernest Jones—1879-1958

Ernest Jones, honorary president of the International and the American Psychoanalytic Associations, died in London on February 11 of cancer metastases.

He was born on January 1, 1879 at Gowerton, South Wales. The village doctor lived in his parents' house for some years, and the little frail and delicate Ernest, who started to walk a mile to school at the age of three, wanted to be a doctor, as far back as he remembered. However, his mother wanted him to become a minister, and his father wished him to stay with coal mining. The doctor dashed his hopes and declared him too delicate to become a doctor. Yet fate came to Jones's help: the doctor died. The next one pooh-poohed the idea of bad health. The father tried to sink a pit, which—fortunately for the little Ernest, and for us—contained no coal. The mother gave in, and so at sixteen Jones entered Cardiff University. He remained proud of what he called his native country, Wales, and was pleased to hear that Freud knew anything about the Welsh.

Jones was first introduced to psychoanalysis by Wilfred Trotter, the brilliant surgeon-philosopher-psychologist, who ranked next to Freud and Huxley in Jones's esteem. In his introduction to Volume I of his Freud biography, Jones emphasizes how he himself had passed on his way to psychoanalysis through the identical disciplines as Freud did: philosophy, neurology, disorders of speech, and psychopathology.

In 1906 he read Freud's "Dora" and was entranced by it. He immediately started intensive study of German, in order to follow with greater ease Freud's work. Through Osler he obtained the Toronto professorship. Before sailing, he went for six months to the Continent. In Zurich, which was then the center of modern psychiatry, he met with Bleuler, Binswanger, Claparède, Oberholzer, Brill, and mainly with Jung. It was the period when this group was working enthusiastically on the applications of Freud's theories. There the idea of the first Congress was conceived, w