The name of Ernest Jones is not much heard these days, and yet he was as pivotal to the dissemination of psychoanalysis and Freudianism as T.H. Huxley was to the science of Darwinism. And he had a Canadian connection. Freud’s Wizard: The Enigma of Ernest Jones, Brenda Maddox’s recent prize-winning biography, coincides with the centennial of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Medicine, where Jones worked from 1908 to 1912. His career demonstrates that it was no simple task being a Freudian at the end of the Victorian era, certainly not in a town like Toronto. (Full disclosure here: As an historian of Canadian psychiatry, I provided Maddox with some of her research materials on the Toronto sections of this book.)
Born in Gowerton, South Wales, in 1879, Ernest Jones was an outstanding medical student and a licenced physician at the age of 21. However, some of his colleagues resented Jones’s sharp tongue and contemptuous manner. This unfortunate combination of arrogance and insensitivity got Jones into serious trouble. In the early days of his career, he was notorious for ignoring hospital rules and etiquette. For example, due to being absent without leave and defying the orders of the matron, Jones was forced to resign his post as resident medical officer at a children’s hospital. His self-esteem suffered an even greater blow when Jones was charged with indecent exposure.
This latter incident occurred while Jones was administering speech tests to pubescent girls at a London County council school for retarded children. Defended by the renowned Archibald Bodkin, the case was “literally laughed out of court. The magistrate knew that no jury would convict on the evidence of mentally unreliable children.” Nevertheless, Jones’s medical career in London foundered when, in March 1908, he was fired from the West End Hospital for Diseases of the Nervous System for examining and discussing sexual matters with a female patient without the presence of a third party. Uninvited, Jones had examined a ten-year-old girl with a paralysed arm and determined that her condition had a sexual etiology. His doom was sealed when it was revealed that Jones had examined the young patient without the permission of her attending physician or her parents.
In order to recover from this traumatic experience, Jones went to Munich and enrolled in postgraduate studies in clinical psychiatry with Emil Kraepelin. While in Europe, Jones met Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud. On meeting Jones at a conference in Amsterdam, Jung promptly wrote to Freud: “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 psycho-analytical work himself … He is very intelligent and could do a lot of good.” Freud later replied: “Jones is undoubtedly a very interesting and worthy man, but he gives me a feeling of, I was almost going to say racial strangeness. He is a fanatic and doesn’t eat enough.” Nevertheless, a relationship was established, as demonstrated by the 671 surviving letters that Jones wrote to Freud until the end of the famous doctor’s life.
It was from Kraepelin that Jones learned that C.K. Clarke was in the process of recruiting clinicians for his new psychiatric clinic in Toronto. Jones arrived in Toronto in September 1908 to meet his new boss, laden with glowing testimonials from William Osler and the celebrated English pathologist Frederick Henry Mott. At that time, Dr. Charles Kirk Clarke was the medical superintendent of the Toronto Asylum and a professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto. In 1911, he was appointed dean of medicine and superintendent of the Toronto General Hospital. Clarke’s campaign to persuade the government of Ontario to build and staff a psychiatric clinic modelled on Kraepelin’s clinic in Heidelberg was posthumously rewarded in 1925 with the opening of the Toronto Psychiatric Hospital.
In his first letter to Freud from Toronto, Jones was optimistic. His subsequent letters were much less so. In a kvetching mood he wrote: “Music is rare here, and there is not a picture gallery in the country. The people are 19 parts American, and one part Colonial … They are a despicable race, exceedingly bourgeois, quite uncultured, very rude, very stupid and very narrow and pious.” While not unusual with recent immigrants, this negative state of mind made Jones’s life in the “medical backwoods” of Toronto more difficult than it should have been. Jones was particularly scathing because, at the time of his arrival, there was no formal department of neurology at the University of Toronto. His initial appointment at the Faculty of Medicine was that of demonstrator in anatomy and physiology. With a munificent stipend of $600 per annum, Jones also served under Clarke as director of an out-patient clinic and as pathologist and neurologist at the Toronto Asylum.
As a follower of Kraepelin, Clarke rejected psychoanalytical ideas and was embarrassed by Ernest Jones’s obsession with sexual aberrations. Clarke was also upset because Jones, a single man, was cohabiting in Toronto with an unmarried woman. Nevertheless, Clarke promoted Jones to the rank of assistant professor and arranged for him to give lectures on clinical psychiatry to medical students. As if to keep him out of mischief, Clarke made Jones head of the neurology ward at Toronto General Hospital. Pleased with his promotion, Jones boasted to Freud about his unlimited opportunity to indoctrinate medical students. My own research on this topic, however, indicates that Jones’s lectures to medical students were restrained and “untainted” by Freudian psychoanalysis.
Ernest Jones attributed his great productivity to his unhappiness in Toronto. In addition to writing many papers on neurological and clinical matters, in 1910 Jones published two of his most important essays: “On the Nightmare” and “The Oedipus Complex as an Explanation of Hamlet’s Mystery: A Study in Motive.” In 1937, when the great Shakespearian actor Laurence Olivier was preparing for the role of Hamlet, he called upon Jones for advice. Olivier learned that Hamlet suffered from an Oedipus complex and that the symptoms of the condition could include mood swings, cruel treatment of his love and a hopeless inability to pursue the course required of him.
Although popular as a lecturer on the American university campuses he visited, Jones was less well received in Toronto. At a meeting of the Canadian Medical Association in June 1910, Jones was heckled by two irate neurologists from New York because, after being psychoanalyzed, their wives had decided to leave them. For a while, after the publication of Freud’s Worcester lectures, attacks increased on Freudianism (which, in the popular mind, meant free love, removal of all restraints and a relapse to the state of savagery). In this period, Herbert Bruce, a distinguished Toronto physician, urged the president of the University of Toronto to dismiss Jones because he was a sexual pervert and likely to corrupt the medical students. Adding to these problems, Jones reported to Freud that a former patient, who accused him of having sexual intercourse with her, had threatened to shoot him. Later on, Jones confessed that he had “foolishly paid the woman $500.00 blackmail.”
Jones’s personal life was equally distressing. His “harem” included his independently wealthy co-vivant Loe Kann, two of his sisters and two servants. They lived all together, although not amicably, at 407 Brunswick Avenue, north of Bloor Street. As Kann, a morphine addict, also suffered from sexual paresthesia (genital itching, burning and prickling), her life with Jones was fraught. Perhaps by way of compensation—or was it hostility?—Jones became sexually involved with one of Kann’s servants. Kann became increasingly depressed and suicidal. To save Jones from further ignominy, Freud—who made no secret of his penchant for wealthy patients—accepted her for psychoanalysis in Vienna.
Paradoxically, Jones’s decision to leave Toronto was followed by increased demand for his psycho-analytic services. His new patients included a professor of romance languages and the daughter of the university’s chancellor. Almost certainly, this encouraged the Reverend Robert Alexander Falconer, the university president, to resist the demands for Jones’s dismissal. In fact, Jones was invited to repeat his lectures on psychiatry in the following academic year. Jones was prepared to do so if he was permitted to spend six months in Toronto and six months in London. As this was unacceptable to the university, in June 1912 Jones and Kann left Toronto and returned to Europe.
After leaving Canada, Jones had a brief marriage to a professional musician and singer, Morfydd Owen, and then married for a second time. His new wife, Kathrina Jokl, was fluent in German and English and had a doctorate in economics from the University of Zurich. During their long life together, Ernest and Kitty Jones produced four children. And together they wrote a three-volume biography of Sigmund Freud as well as many scientific papers.
Brenda Maddox provides a remarkably sympathetic account of Jones’s transformation from Freud’s “Rottweiler” to his “wizard.” The hostile appellation of Rottweiler was provoked by Jones’s draconian attempts to sanitize the early history of psychoanalysis. The title of wizard served more aptly because, in 1938, together with Princess Marie Bonaparte, Jones secured the release of Freud and his family from Nazi-occupied Vienna and resettled them in Hampstead, London. In the years that followed Freud’s death in 1939, Jones completed his magisterial biography of Freud and devoted himself to the Sisyphean task of protecting and perfecting psychoanalysis.
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