Ernest Jones: Founder of the American Psychoanalytic Association

In October 1908, Ernest Jones arrived in Torronto, Canada, where he became an Associate Professor of Psychiatry in the University with teaching duties at the General Hospital. He began a private practice, and he sent letters to colleagues in the United States announcing his presence in Toronto. Morton Prince invited him to Boston in December 1908, and made him

Assistant Editor of his newly-founded Journal of Abnormal Psychology. In Boston Jones met James J. Putnam, the first Professor of Neurology at Harvard University. Although Jones was 29 and Putnam was 62, the older man showed a keen interest in what he could learn about psychoanalysis from Jones.

1909 was an eventful year for psychoanalysis in America. In May Jones went to New Haven, Connecticut, where he presented a paper on psychoanalysis at the American Therapeutic Congress. Jones has stated that it was the first time anywhere that a paper on psychoanalysis was read at a medical congress (Jones, 1959). In September Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, accompanied by Sandor Ferenczi, arrived in Worcester, Massachussetts. Freud and Jung spoke at Clark University at the invitation of President G. Stanley Hall, a prominent psychologist. Freud lectured for five days on psychoanalysis. Jones was there with A. A. Brill of New York, Putnam and others. Jones and Brill had met each other in Zurich, and had gone to the informal congress in Salzburg in 1908 where they had both met Freud for the first time.

Jones visited Freud in Holland in the summer of 1910. Freud stressed to Jones the need in America for a branch society of the International Psycho-Analytical Association which had been founded at the congress in Nuremberg in March. The correspondence between Jones and Putnam, edited by Hale (1971), contains the steps that led to the founding of the American Psychoanalytic Association in Baltimore, Maryland, on 9 May 1911. Jones