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Havelock Ellis, the distinguished writer and social philosopher, died in 1939 at the age of eighty. This is not the place to speak of his many-sided activities in the service of science and culture, but
among them there were a few important contacts with Psycho-Analysis. He will be specially remembered in its history for two things. He was perhaps the first person in England to call attention to Freud's contributions to psychopathology, and also it was to him that we mainly owe the familiar terms 'auto-erotism' and 'narcissism'.
The pioneer work that Havelock Ellis did in the investigation of sexual phenomena is well known. His remarkable shyness denied him direct access to clinical material, all his data being obtained by correspondence. His work, therefore, valuable as it was, hardly rose above the level of description and collation; he was not able to throw much new light on the inner significance of the data he collected. To an analyst it was evident that he suffered from inhibitions that could not be overcome, and that his insight into the importance of Freud's work, which in a sense was in competition with his own, remained a partial one. This fact came more and more to expression as the laudations of Freud in his earlier writings were accompanied later on with increasingly sweeping modifications.