Medicine: Sigmund’s Jewel

The waltzes were good and loud that year, sex was still primarily something to be enjoyed in the Vienna woods rather than to be talked about by learned doctors, and all seemed well with the world. But Vienna’s Dr. Sigmund Freud was gloomy: two heretics, Carl Jung and Alfred Adler, had rebelled against the Freudian tenets. In this crisis, six loyal disciples solemnly undertook to uphold the straight gospel, and to each, Freud presented a jewel. That was in 1912, and of the select six, only one survives: Ernest Jones, 74, a spry, Homburg-hatted little Welshman* whom Freud called the greatest psychoanalyst in the English-speaking world.

Last week, proudly sporting Freud’s jewel—an amber-colored intaglio of the head of Socrates mounted on a gold ring —Dr. Jones was still busy in the master’s cause. At the congress of the International Psycho-Analytical Association, which brought 575 analysts to London, his formal contribution was a paper on Freud’s early travels. More importantly, perhaps, he served as a kind of monument to psychoanalysis.

Dr. Jones discovered Freud’s writings as a brilliant young practitioner in the safe sun of the Edwardian era. He reacted as though he had found the elixir of life. He mastered German to extract the full flavor of every word, and introduced psychoanalysis to a shocked England. Orthodox physicians (in the Freudian phrase) ventilated their aggressions on the pioneer analysts.

He worked prodigiously, conducting analyses, ‘researching psychological mechanisms (he coined the psychiatric term “rationalization”), writing scores of learned books and papers (e.g., on early female sexuality, nightmares, Hamlet, folklore). At the drop of an inhibition, he would hie to Vienna and go off on walking-talking tours with Freud. It was Jones who in 1928 won over the British Medical Association to a policy which recognizes trained Freudians as the only true analysts. And it was Jones who braved Nazi cops in 1938 to bring the ailing Freud, with his wife and daughter Anna, from Vienna to England. Since he was bombed out of London during the blitz, Dr. Jones himself has become a placid countryman. He likes to look out of his windows at the rolling Sussex hills, which he calls “maternal mounds.” A close student of the Oedipus-complected Hamlet, he is said to have coached Sir Laurence Olivier on the proper gestures to suggest the prince’s improper urges.

Today, Jones thinks the Adler-Jung heresies have “pretty well faded out,” but in his forthcoming massive biography of the master, he concedes that Freud’s was “not a complete, rounded-off theory . . . but a gradually opening vista, occasionally blurred and again clarified.” Last week’s conference brought at least one blur. Dr. Edith Weigert of Chevy Chase, Md. reported that, while theoretically the patient “transfers” to the analyst, it can work the other way too. Sometimes, said Dr. Weigert, “in phases of negative transference” the analyst’s “own anxieties exceed those of the patient.”

In other words, analysts can get as jittery as anyone else, with the possible exception of sturdy little Dr. Jones, who may draw his strength from Freud’s teachings or from his Socratic ring—or from his Edwardian past.

*The others: Germany’s Karl Abraham and Max Eitingon, Austria’s Otto Rank and Hanns Sachs, Hungary’s Sandor Ferenczi.