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“Now for a great surprise: among the English contingent there was a young man from London, Dr Jones (a Celt from Wales!) who knows your writings very well and does psychoanalytic work himself. He will probably visit you later. He is very intelligent and could do a lot of good” (McGuire, 1974, p. 86). Jung wrote these words to Freud on 11 September 1907 from Zurich, on arriving home from the Premier Congrés International de Psychiatrie, de Neurologie, de Psychologie et de I'Assistance des Aliénés. Freud replied on 19 September from Rome, where he was holidaying, with a certain haughtiness, as if Jung's account went entirely without saying: “The Celt who surprised you is certainly not the only one; before the year is out we shall hear of unexpected supporters and you will acquire others at your flourishing school” (McGuire, 1974, p. 88).
Jones had been discussing with Jung the possibility of organizing a congress on psychoanalysis in Salzburg. Replying from Vienna to another of Jung's letters extolling Jones's human virtues and enthusiasm, Freud adopted a slightly different tone: “Your Englishman appeals to me because of his nationality,” he wrote, adding, “I believe that once the English have become acquainted with our ideas they will never let them go” (McGuire, 1974, p. 102). For the founder of psychoanalysis, the pure chance of being able to add a Welshman like Jones to the still threadbare ranks of his non-Viennese followers constituted an opportunity to project his ideas into English culture and find roots for them there, enabling him to become part of a world he had loved since his youth.
In 1908 Jones headed for Canada, where in October he would take up a post at the University of Toronto, seeking his academic and professional fortune after a brief but by no means easy or uneventful career in medicine and neurology in London and several months spent studying with Jung at the Burghölzli in Zurich. He visited Freud with A. A. Brill, a psychiatrist