Andrew Lycett

On the Couch

Freud’s Wizard: The Enigma of Ernest Jones

By

John Murray 330pp £20 order from our bookshop

Ernest Jones was not called ‘Freud’s Rottweiler’ for nothing. In September 1933, when Nazi discrimination laws were taking their toll and Jewish shrinks were queuing to leave Germany, Jones, president of the International Psychoanalytic Association, dared to ask his mentor Sigmund Freud why members of his profession were so neurotic. They seemed to spend so much time squabbling among themselves.

Typically, it was a rhetorical question, which he answered himself. One reason was that they were neurotic by definition; otherwise they would not have chosen that field. In addition, they were overworked and, thirdly, they had not been sufficiently analysed.

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • 'Full of invention which, at its most pedestrian, is eminently Victorian, and at its most unrestrained wildly imagi… ,
    • 'What in other hands could have been a dry, pedantic account of Christianity’s birth and evolution becomes in Holla… ,
    • RT : One of my favourite literary magazines is celebrating 40 years this year. Here is the September edition of… ,
    • 'Now that the Thames is too fast-flowing to freeze, its spirit’s devotees ... have found other climes for their pri… ,
    • 'Bythell glowers past his till at a world in slow free fall.' on the travails of a second-hand book… ,
    • 'It is a scent of animal wrath, of instinctive need, of brutal life which affects the cultured nostrils of our civi… ,
    • 'The day produced countless stories of chance, of people taking one route or another without realising that the dec… ,
    Follow Us