Freud's wizard

About this book

This book is a riveting portrait of Ernest Jones, the brilliant and flawed analyst who was Freud's colleague, impresario, biographer -- and who rescued him from the Nazis. After a near-ruinous start to his professional career, including brushes with the law, Jones piloted himself to become Freud's second-in-command. He did so through prodigious energy, administrative skill and literary ability -- bolstered by wide reading and and acerbic wit. His vast output of books and articles, capped by the three-volume Sigmund Freud: Life and Work, is astonishing. Jones also had the gift of making things happen. He founded not only the British Psycho-Analytical Society, but also the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, and edited it for many years, writing a good part of it himself. The book I have written is not concerned with the comparative merits of Freudian and Jungian psychoanalysis, nor with the future of psychoanalysis in the twentiy-first century. Rather, it is the life story of an extraordinary man -- one of the shapers of the 20th century and a controversy all figure who, in his lifetime and after, drew much criticism for his alleged arrogance, autocracy, dishonesty and, not least, hagiography. I was fascinated to buy the saga of a man who conquered what he described to Freud as "various wrong tendencies in myself" and who went on to achieve a happy and productive marriage. The transition from near-ruin to towering accomplishment is part of the fascination of his life story. - Introduction.