The first chapter of Ernest Jones's misleadingly entitled autobiography, Free Associations, ends with a bemusing paragraph about the Welsh 'servant who acted also as a nurse' during Jones's early childhood: 'One of my memories of this nurse was that she taught me two words to designate the male organ, one for it in a flaccid state, the other in an erect. It was an opulence of vocabulary I have not encountered since.' As this superbly-edited correspondence shows, this childhood memory was a kind of symbolic omen, an uncanny foreshadowing of Jones's later preoccupations. The translation of psychoanalysis - both trying to get it across and turning it into English - was to be Jones's mission.

LRB 5 August 1993 | PDF Download