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One could be forgiven for thinking that Sigmund Freud didn’t have a ‘British Family’. Although he would occasionally declare that, as a Jew, he didn’t feel Viennese or even Austrian, he was very much a man of his class and place and time: bourgeois Vienna in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. When Ernest Jones first discovered psychoanalysis in 1907, he and his friend and colleague Wilfred Trotter began studying German, for how else could they read Freud? How else could they engage with Freud and his Continental circle who were championing what soon began to be called ‘the cause’?
When Jones first met Freud in Saltzburg in the spring of 1908 at what in retrospect was the first International Psychoanalytic Congress, he discovered to his surprise that Freud’s English was remarkably good. When after the conference Jones visited Freud at his home in Vienna, they conversed in English, and when he wrote to thank Freud for his hospitality, he began a correspondence that, on his side, with the exception of two postcards in German, would continue in English until Freud’s death more than 30 years later. Freud responded in kind. Indeed most of Freud’s side of the correspondence is in English, and when Jones admitted that he struggled to read the old German script, Freud shifted to Latin characters even when writing to Jones in German.
Although Freud was never a fan of America, he was a life-long anglophile. Jones would find Canada a cultural hinterland during his five years in Toronto, while the United States seemed to him only somewhat more sophisticated, and Freud would agree, especially after his generally uncomfortable experience during his visit to Clark University in Massachusetts in 1909. The fact that Jones was ‘Celtic’ (Welsh by birth and English by affiliation) was as much of a factor in their friendship as his able intellect and commitment to psychoanalysis.
So when and how and why did Freud master English and what were the sources, nature and effect of