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In this article I want to focus upon Ernest Jones's role in saving psychoanalysts, and on the case of Drs Otto and Salomea Isakower. During the 1930s when refugee analysts left Germany and Austria, which coincided with the time of the Great Depression, psychoanalysts in New York and London were ambivalent about receiving more competitors from Europe. Although this has been noted as having been an issue in the US (see Kirsner 2000, pp. 16-21), it is of interest to know the attitudes of Ernest Jones as well as those of members of the British Psychoanalytical Society. Pearl King (1989) has described the wartime activities of the British psychoanalysts (see also King & Steiner 1991).
The major emigration of psychoanalysts from Nazism in the 1930s transferred the epicentre of psychoanalysis from Europe to the United States as well as providing significant immigration of psychoanalysts to Britain. This was in the context of the fact that, though estimates vary, at least 56,000 refugees from Germany and Austria became residents of Britain before war broke out (Holmes 1990, p. 26; see also Brinson 1998, p. 205).
During the 1930s Ernest Jones was president of the International Psychoanalytical Association and, in the crucial year of 1938, also president of the British Psychoanalytical Society. He directed much of the emigration of European psychoanalysts to the far corners of the world. Much of this is documented in the invaluable work of Ricardo Steiner (1989, 2000) and Pearl King (1989). In particular, Steiner (2000) helpfully and interestingly documented many letters between Anna Freud and Ernest Jones during the 1930s concerning the politics of psychoanalysis in Germany and Austria, and discussed issues about the role Jones played in these psychoanalytic politics in trying to ‘save’ psychoanalysis in Europe (see also Cocks 1997; Goggin & Goggin 2001;