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Although the inception of psychoanalysis in Britain has been well documented, the endeavours of a small, pioneering enterprise have been, by and large, marginalized. The Medico-Psychological Clinic of London (1913-1922) was set up under inauspicious circumstances: when it was officially launched on 5 November 1913 it was surrounded by a furore of criticism and frantic correspondence in the press, both medical and lay.
Neither in his biography of Freud nor in his own autobiography does Ernest Jones make any allusion to the existence of the Medico-Psychological Clinic. It is safe to assume that Jones ignored its existence because in 1913 he was setting up his own society, the London Psycho-Analytical Society, which was run along the lines of strictly Freudian psychoanalysis. The Medico-Psychological Clinic, as I will highlight, was far more eclectic in its outlook and took on the training of lay analysts, something of which Jones adamantly disapproved.
Evidence for Jones's censorship of the Clinic is found in the archives of the British Psychoanalytical Society. In 1920 a series of letters between Jones and Freud directly refers to the Medico-Psychological Clinic (which was also known as the Brunswick Square Clinic). These letters bear witness to the constant struggle the founders of the Clinic were under to gain acceptance and credibility. Jones's tone in each letter is demeaning and censorious. Jones criticizes the training practices at the Clinic's sister association, the Society for the Study of Orthopsychics (SSO). ‘I might remark on the difficulty caused in London’, he writes to Freud, ‘by analysts being analysed abroad for a few weeks or a couple of months and then on their return