Open Letter to Dr. Ernest Jones

Doctor Jones:

We come with our laurels of distinction. In honouring you we honour ourselves. As we read through the successive editions of your Papers on Psycho-Analysis, with their carefully chosen and merited re-emphases on certain aspects of this discipline, we admire the felicity and grace of your expression which enhances the solid merits of the scientific exposition. You have captured in no small measure the art of statement of your master and we have all profited thereby.

Not only in your many scattered papers have you shown this special gift, but more specially in the 'slow moving picture of the developments of psycho-analysis', as you have so aptly noted, has your turn of phrase held and enlightened us.

Rich as have been these gifts we are further in your debt largely because of the good fortune that you should have been with us when the more active planting of psycho-analytic activities took place.

While Dr. A. A. Brill was in Burghölzli (1907–1908) and grazing in the first extra-Viennese oasis with Jung, Abraham, Eitingon and Bleuler, we have heard it said you made with him your first pilgrimage to Vienna. When the following year you came to Toronto and joined in the Stanley Hall centennial, a third nest of a psycho-analytic brooding saw you in its incubation.

You were an active agent in the formation of the American Psycho-analytic Association in Washington in May, 1911, and served as Secretary for three years, when the office was handed over to a fellow-Canadian, John McCurdy.

This is all but slightly important history, but it does serve to locate you in time and space as well as in the 'hearts of your countrymen'. For in a unique way, whether you are especially proud of it or not, you are one of us. We are proud of you and of your influence in the early building up of psycho-analysis in the United States. When in 1913 you left us, we were standing alone with both a national and a local society, with an independent press which has contributed many psyc