Jones, Ernest

   (1879–1958)

   Known as the Welshman who was closest to Freud’s inner circle and as Freud’s most prominent early biographer, Jones was born into the family of a mineowner in Wales. In 1901, he graduated with an M.B. from University College London and soon thereafter his brother-in-law, a surgeon, drew his attention to Freud’s works. Given the depressed state of British psychiatry at the time, Jones is said to have been awed that there was "a man in Vienna who actually listened with attention to every word his patients said to him." In 1908, Jones attended the first international psychoanalytical congress in Salzburg, where he met Freud and decided to devote himself to Freud’s doctrine. From 1908 to 1913, he lectured on psychiatry at the medical school in Toronto—one of the earliest psychoanalysts to teach in a faculty of medicine. From this Canadian outpost, he began to seed North America with psychoanalysts, and in 1911 helped found the American Psychoanalytic Association. Then in 1913, he set himself up in London as a practitioner of psychoanalysis and founded the London Psycho-Analytical Society, which in 1919 became the British Psycho-Analytical Society, as it was then called, of which Jones was president for many years. In 1953, the first volume of his source-based but hagiographical biography of Freud was published, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, the third and last appearing in 1957.