You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Dr. Jones is pre-eminently qualified to discuss the early history of psychoanalysis not only because of his historical role in the psychoanalytic movement, but also because of his authoritative researches on the early life of Freud. In this paper, he demonstrates from his own experience the significance of psychoanalysis in relation to psychiatry and neurology during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Jones began his career as a physician with an intense interest in the psychopathology of the neuroses. At that time psychiatry was at a low level in England. There were no opportunities for psychiatric training comparable to those that exist today. The psychopathology of neurosis was the province of the neurologists, 'doubtless in deference to the popular belief that neurologists being concerned with the nervous system were the proper people to cure "nerves" as neurotic conditions were then called'. Jones, therefore, was trained as a neurologist, but supplemented his experience with regular visits to the asylums near London. Even the most prominent neurologists treated the neuroses empirically as disorders of the brain, whereas in the asylums treatment of mental patients was primarily custodial. Nowhere did he encounter much clinical or psychological interest until he went to Kraepelin's Institute in Munich where he observed that patients were studied 'with absorbed interest from every point of view'. This experience gave him an entirely different view of psychiatry and led to his becoming a psychiatrist. However, he everywhere 'missed any concern with the psychodynamics of the processes in question, any explanation of what brought them about and what they represented in the patient's mind'. In an effort to elucidate this problem be began independently to investigate patients' memories under hypnosis. When in 1905 he came across