A Portrait of the Psychoanalyst as a Bohemian: Ernest Jones and the ‘Lady from Styria’1

In 1908 psychoanalysis went international with the first Congress of those interested in Freud's ideas, the Zusammenkunft für Freud'sche Psychologie, held in Salzburg in late April. It was there that many of the figures who were to become central to the psychoanalytic movement met each other for the first time. In the month before the Congress Freud had published his ‘“Civilized” Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness’ with its exploration of the precarious relationship between ‘civilized’ morality and the sexual instinct. It was not the first time that he had addressed the subject, but this was his most comprehensive discussion to date (Solms, 1990). The ostensible stimulus for his essay was von Ehrenfels's Sexual Ethics in which Ehrenfels, citing Freud, advocated polygamy ‘as a panacea against the degeneration caused by industrialism’ (Johnston, 1972, p. 304; see also Makari, 2008, pp. 143-4). Freud was sufficiently interested in his friend Ehrenfels's ideas to invite him to the Vienna Society in late 1908, but at this point, in the lead up to the Congress, he used Ehrenfels's book as a launch pad to state his