The Organizing of Psychoanalysis in Britain

Institutionalization has been important for the survival of psychoanalytic ideas and for their developments (Hinshelwood 1997). Previously, I described the earliest points in British culture which gave access to these ideas (Hinshelwood 1995). I discerned seven of them in fact. In this paper, I want to address the question of how a pattern of institutions committed to psychoanalysis emerged from those points of interest eventually.

Institutionalization began around 1910, and the pattern that survives today had taken its form by 1925. Two main strategies developed: one was to create an exclusive organization of designated psychoanalysts; the other was to penetrate and influence other institutions devoted to other primary aims. A number of institutional forms can be noted; there were four of these—(i) organizations for professional practitioners, (ii) clinics and hospitals for the practice of psychoanalysis, (iii) university teaching programmes, and (iv) schools run according to principles derived from psychoanalytic ideas. We cannot ignore the contribution of particular people. Foremost of these is Ernest Jones, but his stature has tended to overshadow the contribution of certain others, notably Bernard Hart, T.W. Mitchell, Jessie Murray and W.H.R. Rivers. 1

Although Ernest Jones became the leading proponent of psychoanalysis in Britain he did not become acquainted with it until 1905. In that year he discovered Freud's case history of Dora, in German, published in 1905 in Monatschrift fur Psychiatrie and Neurologie (, p. 159). He later recalled,

I got your books in 1906 and practised psycho-analysis (imperfectly to be sure) for a year before the Amsterdam Congress Sept. 1907, where I first met Jung (and Otto Gross). (Jones letter to Freud 18 May 1914: Paskauskas 1993, p. 281)

The Congress in 1907 to which Jones referred was the International Congress of Neurology in Amsterdam.