Did the Toronto medical establishment know why Ernest Jones left England in 1908?

What is it about?

This paper, which is part of a wider study reassessing the early medical career of Ernest Jones, takes as its starting point, a letter written in July 1962, by the Toronto surgeon Herbert Bruce. A close reading of that letter suggests that the opposition to Jones in Canada was not because of Jones’s supposedly unflinching support for Freud but because Bruce and his colleagues had good grounds for believing Jones “was a pervert.”

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Why is it important?

For far too long historians of psychology, psychoanalysis and other related social sciences, have accepted Ernest Jones’s autobiographical claims that his troubles in Toronto were, in large part, due to his unflinching adherence to Freud’s sexual theories. Reassessing a neglected letter from the Toronto surgeon Herbert Bruce [the Bruce Letter] suggests that the main reasons for suspicions against Jones had little to do with Jones’s adherence to Freud. What seems to have exercised Bruce, and his colleagues, were the rumours that Jones faced serious sexual allegations in London and that he had fled to Canada in order to escape arrest. Further research, as yet unpublished, reveals that even before Jones arrived in Toronto there were a number of American physicians already discussing the merits or otherwise of Freud’s work and, this in turn suggests that the opposition to Freud’s theories has been grossly overstated. Reassessing the Bruce letter also suggests that it is time to look again at Jones’s role in promoting Freud’s work in America.