The Complete Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Ernest Jones, 1908-39

Soon after their first meeting in 1908, Freud's future biographer, Ernest Jones, initiated a correspondence with the founder of psychoanalysis that would continue until Freud's death in London in 1939.

Jones, a Welsh-born neurologist, would become a principal player in the development of psychoanalysis in England and the United States.

This volume makes available, from British and American archives, nearly 700 previously unpublished letters, postcards and telegrams, the vast majority of the three-decade correspondence between Freud and his admiring younger colleague. These letters and notes, dashed off almost compulsively in the odd moments of busy professional lives in Toronto, Vienna, and London, in transit between meetings, or on holidays on the Continent, provide a lively account of the early years of the psychoanalytic movement and its fortunes during the turbulent interwar period.

The reader is invited to share in the domestic and international news of the day, to make the acquaintance of the prominent personalities among the first generation of Freud's followers, and to witness the drama of complex rivalries and conflicting loyalities - including the personal and intellectual rupture between Freud and Jung, and Jones's unrelenting effort to manoeuvre politically "behind the scenes" in order to position himself within Freud's inner circle.

Also present in the correspondence are the women who, in differing ways, touched the lives of both men and influenced their work - Loe Kann, Joan Riviere, Melanie Klein, and Anna Freud. While charting the progress of a personal friendship, this correspondence offers glimpses of the darker events of the time - the last days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the rise of Nazism in Europe.

Even though on a professional level the two correspondents differed on a striking array of issues - such as the theory of anxiety, the death and aggressive instincts, child analysis, female sexuality, and lay analysis - their letters are an affirmation of the intellectual and emotional bonds between these two very different men, who, as Jones puts it so poignantly in his last letter to Freud, had "both made a contribution to human existence - even if in very different measure".