The Mental and the Physical Origins of Behaviour1

We are here to recognize the great services which Dr. Ernest Jones has rendered to the psycho-analytic movement in this country. For more than thirty years he has held a commanding position in a new science which has gradually become an established part of our outlook on human behaviour, and the new science by its very nature has had to overcome much more than the usual amount of opposition. You are honouring your own leader and it is a great privilege for me, a stranger to all but the rudiments of psycho-analysis, to be invited to give this first Ernest Jones memorial lecture. It is a privilege, but it involves more than the usual amount of anxiety proper to these occasions, for I must do my best to lull our subject into a sense of false security, to prevent him from realizing what he may be in for. This meeting must not be the prelude to sleepless nights in which he will lie thinking of future lectures which will display him to posterity as a model of whatever the lecturer may regard as virtue and as the holder of whatever views the lecturer may think he ought to have held. For there are perils in this form of immortality as in the other kinds, and there is much to be said for regulations like that for the Seatonian poem at Cambridge which was to be on one of the attributes of the Divine Being from year to year until such time as the subject should be exhausted. That occurred some years ago, and Dr. Ernest Jones may be glad to look forward to the time when his attributes, too, may be taken for granted. To encourage that hope I shall make no further attempt to extol them this evening, for I should be trying to tell you what you know already far better than I.

Yet there is a personal reason which explains why a physiologist should leave his furrow for such unusual country. Before the war of 1914 I was a medical student at Cambridge with two friends who were particularly interested in disorders of the mind. Nowadays these things have become the stock-in-trade