Abstract
Ernest Jones was born in Gowerton, Glamorganshire, the son of a clerk in a South Wales coal company. He was educated at Llandovery College, Cardiff University, and in 1898 went to University College Hospital, London, qualifying in 1900. He received the Gold Medal for his MD. Medical journalism and neuropsychiatric research brought him into contact with Sigmund Freud whom he met in 1908 at an International psychoanalytical conference in Salzburg. He learned German in order to study Freud's work and became a lifelong disciple and good friend. He became Professor of Psychiatry at Toronto (1909–1912) where neurosurgeon Harvey Cushing appears to have consulted him in 1910. 1 He founded a Freudian society of collaborators and the British Psychoanalytical Society (1913), edited the International Journal of Psychoanalysis (1920– 1933) and directed the London Clinic for Psychoanalysis. In 1939 he facilitated the escape from Vienna of the Nazi-persecuted Freud and his family to London in a dramatic air flight.
Ernest Jones lived in 19 York Terrace East, Regent's Park (Figure 1) and became an author. He wrote a psychoanalytical study of Hamlet and Oedipus, and an authoritative and definitive three-volume biography of Freud (1953–1957). He also wrote a book on figure skating and became an expert chess player. The charismatic London Welsh hostess Mattie Prichard vividly recounts her early life as tutor to his children in Regent's Park. Brenda Maddox has published a splendid new life of Ernest Jones. 2
Plaque courtesy of AMS James