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In the summer of 1912 Ernest Jones put forward a proposal to Freud for the formation of a Secret Committee that was to watch over the development of psychoanalysis and provide a source of comfort to Freud in times of severe dissent (Jones, 1955, p. 152). Within a year the membership of the Committee was established. Apart from Freud and Jones, the first members included Otto Rank, Sandor Ferenczi, Karl Abraham and Hans Sachs. In May 1913 Freud presented the members with a Greek intaglio, which eventually each member had mounted on a ring to serve as a symbol of their unity.
Jones's proposal made no mention of Carl Jung as a possible member of the Committee, even though Jung and Freud had not yet severed their ties and Jung was still president of the International Psycho-Analytical Association. This was politically significant. The exclusion of Jung from membership of the Secret Committee was the first of a series of events leading up to a crucial shift in power within the psychoanalytic movement in 1914, when Jones displaced Jung in the power structure.
The issue of Jung's exclusion from Freud's inner secret circle is not mentioned by Jones in his historical writings (Jones, 1945, 1954, 1955, 1959; Evans, 1964). Furthermore, in the second volume of his biography of Freud, Jones discussed the Secret Committee in a separate chapter (Jones, 1955, pp. 152-67) which he placed after his discussion of Freud's