34 Facts About Ernest Jones

Alfred Ernest Jones was a Welsh neurologist and psychoanalyst.

Ernest Jones was born in Gowerton, Wales, an industrial village on the outskirts of Swansea, the first child of Thomas and Ann Jones.

Ernest Jones's father was a self-taught colliery engineer who went on to establish himself as a successful businessman, becoming accountant and company secretary at the Elba Steelworks in Gowerton.

Ernest Jones studied at University College London and meanwhile he obtained the Conjoint diplomas LRCP and MRCS in 1900.

Ernest Jones was particularly pleased to receive the University's gold medal in obstetrics from his distinguished fellow-Welshman, Sir John Williams.

Appalled by the treatment of the mentally ill in institutions, Ernest Jones began experimenting with hypnotic techniques in his clinical work.

Ernest Jones first encountered Freud's writings directly in 1905, in a German psychiatric journal in which Freud published the famous Dora case-history.

At the court hearing Ernest Jones maintained his innocence, claiming the girls were fantasising about any inappropriate actions by him.

Ernest Jones duly obliged but, before conducting the interview, he omitted to inform the girl's consultant or arrange for a chaperone.

In 1917, Ernest Jones married the Welsh musician Morfydd Llwyn Owen.

Ernest Jones hoped to get his former colleague and brother-in-law, the leading surgeon Wilfred Trotter, to operate but when this proved impossible emergency surgery was carried out at his father's Swansea home by a local surgeon, with chloroform administered as the anaesthetic.

Ernest Jones had been at school in Vienna with Freud's daughters.

Whilst attending a congress of neurologists in Amsterdam in 1907, Ernest Jones met Carl Jung, from whom he received a first-hand account of the work of Freud and his circle in Vienna.

Ernest Jones travelled to Vienna for further discussions with Freud and introductions to the members of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society.

Ernest Jones took up teaching duties in the Department of Psychiatry of the University of Toronto.

Ernest Jones gave some 20 papers or addresses to American professional societies at venues ranging from Boston, to Washington and Chicago.

Ernest Jones undertook an intensive programme of writing and research, which produced the first of what were to be many significant contributions to psychoanalytic literature, notably monographs on Hamlet and On the Nightmare.

When Jung's resignation came in 1914, it was only the outbreak of the Great War that prevented Ernest Jones from taking his place.

Ernest Jones went on to serve two periods as President of the International Psychoanalytic Association from 1920 to 1924 and 1932 to 1949, where he had significant influence.

Ernest Jones soon obtained from Freud rights to the English translation of his work.

In 1924 the first two volumes of Freud's Collected Papers was published in translations edited by Ernest Jones and supervised by Joan Riviere, his former analysand and, at one stage, ardent suitor.

Ernest Jones then was part of a working group Jones set up to plan and deliver James Strachey's translations for the standard edition of Freud's work.

Ernest Jones's early published work on psychoanalysis had been devoted to expositions of the fundamentals of Freudian theory, an elaboration of its theory of symbolism, and its application to the analysis of religion, mythology, folklore and literary and artistic works.

Under the influence of Melanie Klein, Ernest Jones' work took a new direction.

Ernest Jones's work had a dramatic effect on the British Society, polarising its members into rival factions as it became clear that her approach to child analysis was seriously at odds with that of Anna Freud, as set out in her 1927 book An Introduction to the Technique of Child Analysis.

Ernest Jones argued together with Klein and her Berlin colleague, Karen Horney, for a primary femininity, saying that penis envy arose as a defensive formation rather than arising from the fact, or "injury", of biological asymmetry.

Ernest Jones chaired a number of "extraordinary business meetings" with the aim of defusing the conflict, and these continued into the war years.

Ernest Jones resigned from the presidency of the British Society in 1944, the year in which, under the presidency of Sylvia Payne, there finally emerged a compromise agreement which established parallel training courses providing options to satisfy the concerns of the rival groups that had formed: followers of Anna Freud, followers of Melanie Klein and a non-aligned group of Middle or Independent Group analysts.

Always proud of his Welsh origins, Ernest Jones became a member of the Welsh Nationalist Party, Plaid Cymru.

Ernest Jones had a particular love of the Gower Peninsula, which he had explored extensively in his youth.

Ernest Jones was instrumental in helping secure its status in 1956, as the first region of the UK to be designated an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.

Ernest Jones was made a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in 1942, Honorary President of the International Psychoanalytical Association in 1949, and was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Science degree at Swansea University in 1954.

Ernest Jones died in London on 11 February 1958, and was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium.

Ernest Jones's ashes were buried in the grave of the oldest of his four children in the churchyard of St Cadoc's Cheriton on the Gower Peninsula.