Subterranean Histories: The Dissemination of Freud's Works into the British Discourse on Psychological Medicine, 1904–1911

What is it about?

In his late historical, biographical and autobiographical writings (the late writings) Ernest Jones makes two interrelated claims. The first, which he passes off as an historical 'fact', is that by 1904 there were ‘three sources of information available to [him]’ about Freud. The second, which he makes by way of an autobiographical statement, is that he was already practising ‘the new therapy’ of psychoanalysis by 1906. Reading the contemporaneous sources undermines the spoken and unspoken assumptions that run through Jones’s late writings: that there was little or no discussion of Freud’s ideas in Britain between 1904, when Jones claims he first started reading Freud, and November 1913 when, having returned from exile in Canada, he founded the London Psycho- Analytic Society. For reasons difficult to fathom Jones’s version of this aspect of psychoanalytic history has been accepted almost without question. Lifting Jones’s historical and autobiographical veils reveals very different stories: that by 1910 there was already vibrant debates concerning the merits, or otherwise, of the new Freudian psychology and, what is more, that there were a number of doctors already treating patients through psychoanalysis or its variants. The paper concludes with a reexamination of Jones’s relationship with M.D. Eder.

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Why is it important?

"Subterranean Histories:" is a companion piece to "Footnotes in the History of Psychoanalysis" and both essays prepare the ground work for my forthcoming book 'Psychoanalysis in Britain 1893-1913: Histories and Historiography' (Lexington Books, December 2016).