The Disciple

To laymen, the late Ernest Jones (1879-1958) is best known as the author whose massive The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (TIME, Oct. 19, 1953 et seq.) gave the world its best glimpse so far at what went on behind the brooding brow of the father of psychoanalysis. But Welsh-born Ernest Jones was also the No. 1 psychoanalyst of the English-speaking world. In Free Associations (Basic Books; $5), his unfinished autobiography published last week, Jones offers the world a posthumous look into his own lively mind.

The view, while arresting, is often somewhat unsatisfying. "The practice of coitus," declares Jones, "was familiar to me at the ages of six and seven, after which I suspended it and did not resume it till I was 24." This startling statement he leaves unexplained. No less tantalizing is his claim to inside knowledge of why British General Charles ("Chinese") Gordon and his besieged garrison were overwhelmed at Khartoum in 1885: "All the high endeavour . . . miscarried through the petty episode of Lord Charles Beresford's developing a boil on the bottom at the critical moment." At this critical moment in his anecdote, Jones drops the laconic footnote, "Private information," and rushes on in a mountain torrent of Welsh reminiscences.

Better Than Father. Like most pioneers in psychoanalysis, Jones claims uncanny recollection of earliest childhood. He was only three, he says, when he decided to become a physician. This was when the village doctor delivered his younger sister: "It was plain to me that he was a very exalted person who could bring the results of my father's misdeeds to a happy issue. From that moment, since a doctor was superior even to a father, I resolved to become one." A precocious youth, he made it at 21, emulated his doctor-idol figure by delivering a thousand babies in London slums.

But young Dr. Jones's consuming interest was in affairs of the mind. At the century's turn, he relates, medical psychology was virtually nonexistent in Britain. The doctors' approach to the mind was through the brain and other physical components of the nervous system, so Jones became a neurologist. (So was Freud.) Next, he went through a phase of studying medical uses of hypnotism. (So did Freud.) Then he discovered Freud's early writings on psychoanalysis, and knew that he had found the one true faith.

Like early converts to many another unpopular faith, Jones soon found himself persecuted. In 1906 two small children complained to a teacher that he had "behaved indecently" with them while making a speech test. Jones was arrested, and, although the case was eventually dismissed, it left him a marked man. Later he tried analytic treatment on a girl of ten with hysterical paralysis of the left arm, decided that the origin of the paralysis lay in an incident of sexual "play" with a slightly older boy. For Dr. Jones to discuss sex with a little girl struck Edwardians as outrageous, and his hospital promptly fired him. Years later, when Jones wanted to work on World War I's crop of "shell shock" cases, he found that all London hospitals were barred to him because of that incident.

Against the Evidence. The wonder was that Jones did not get into more trouble than he did. In his mid-20's he entered into a seven-year relationship with a woman he identifies only as Loe. They lived openly together and traveled in Europe, Canada and the U.S. as man and wife. Indirectly, it was Jones's conversion to psychoanalysis that ended this partnership. Loe became emotionally ill, went to Freud to be analyzed--and, as a result, broke off with Jones.

For all that, Jones's loyalty to Freud remained so deep that it prevented completion of his own autobiography. He started Free Associations in 1944, then laid it aside to spend most of the next decade turning out his definitive three-volume biography of the master. When he returned to the story of his own life, there was time to carry it only through World War I before liver cancer killed him. Ironically, despite all the evidence of a lifetime's discipleship, Jones to the last wrote scathingly of disciples, insisting: "I have always been much too independent to play that part."

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