Ernest Jones. Freud's Alter Ego

DEAR SIR,

Thank you very much for letting me see Mr Brome's letter and his remarks on my review of his book, Ernest Jones. Freud's Alter Ego. I would like to answer it point by point.

Sometimes I will have to enlarge Mr Brome's quotations of my statements and some of the statements made in my review. I hope it will be accepted that having to do a review of a book, I had to condense a great deal of what I wanted to say.

(1) In my review, I said that Brome does not relate Jones' paper 'On symbolism', to his historical and cultural background and then I wrote (Steiner, p. 216): 'Brome's allusions are vague, and though he mentions the role of affects, [my italics] he does not seem to realize that one of the most important …' (see Brome's quotation of what I said). Yet Brome omits the last part of my sentence where I was stressing the fact that 'for Jones this repression of affects is an integral part of the symbol's formative process'. From the whole context of Brome's analysis of Jones' paper, it does not seem to me that he actually is able to show the reader the importance of Jones' ideas, although he mentions them, as I have acknowledged. On p. 138 of his book, Brome writes 'The whole body of his [Jones'] theoretical contributions to psychoanalysis which runs into over two hundred papers and books is analysed at length [my italics] in Appendix One'.

When one is confronted with a statement like that, one expects something different than the mention of 14 papers by Jones, plus 'some scattered observations' on what Jones wrote in his biography of Freud, about some other theoretical points of agreement and dissent with Freud. Apart from the fact that some of those 14 papers of Jones are merely mentioned by their title, without further analysis, even the paper 'On symbolism', to which Brome dedicates particular attention, is not related in any way to Jones' other papers and to the development of his own thinking and that of other people except for Lacan. In my opini