The Watchdog of Psychoanalysis

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...