The Big Fish in the Biblical Wilderness

Ladies and Gentlemen,

On behalf of the British Psycho-Analytical Society, it is my pleasure to welcome you here for the 19th Ernest Jones Lecture, to be given this evening by Professor Sir Edmund Leach.

Before I introduce Professor Sir Edmund, I thought I might say just a few words about the Ernest Jones Lecture, how it came to be, and what its function is intended to be. These lectures were established to honour Dr Jones as the first President of the British Psycho-Analytical Society, and as the founder of psychoanalysis in this country. Dr Jones' period of office extended over many years, ending in 1944. And it was to commemorate Dr Jones' presidency that the Society decided to inaugurate these lectures, with the first lecture being held in 1946. It is not appropriate at this moment to describe to you the enormous contribution of Dr Jones to psychoanalysis in this country, but I will say that it was only about ten days ago, on Saturday 26 October, that the Greater London Council extended a special honour to Dr Jones by placing the coveted blue plaque on the house where he lived here in London.

When the Society established this lecture it was with the hope of persuading scientists distinguished in fields other than psychoanalysis to give some at least of these lectures … and that this itself would be a way of honouring and remembering Dr Jones' great interest in endeavours attached to but yet removed from psychoanalysis.

And it is therefore my pleasure now to introduce our speaker for this evening, Professor Sir Edmund Leach, and to thank him for having accepted the invitation to present this evening's lecture. Now, just a few words about Professor Sir Edmund. Before embarking on what has become a particularly distinguished career in social anthropology, he was at first an engineer, and he then studied social anthropology with Malinowski at the London School of Economics in the 1930s. He was in fact in the middle of an anthropologica