The Welsh psychoanalyst Ernest Jones, known for his three-volume hagiography of Freud, was also the author of a book on figure skating. The New York Psychoanalytic Institute owns a dusty copy, which is illustrated with drawings of the elegant squiggles skaters were supposed to leave on the ice: 'Only in a certain type of dream,' Jones wrote, offering a clue to his other area of expertise, 'do we ever else attain a higher degree of the same ravishing experience of exultantly skiing the earth.' It's a useful book; the sinuous diagrams make ice-skating seem easy, and there are tips on what Jones called 'the art of falling'. One should practise, he said, in the privacy of one's bedroom, 'with an ample supply of cushions and eiderdowns'. 'To learn to slither,' he advised, 'is really the art of falling on the ice.' Brenda Maddox suggests that these words 'might have served Jones as his life's motto': his career was full of spectacular flops from which he rose unscathed.

LRB 30 November 2006 | PDF Download