The complete correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Ernest Jones 1908–1939

R. ANDREW PASKAUSKAS (ed.), The complete correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Ernest Jones 1908-1939, Cambridge, Mass., and London, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1993, pp. xlix, 836, £29.95 (0-674-15423-1). EVA BRABANT, ERNST FALZEDER, PATRIZIA GIAMPIERI-DEUTSCH (eds), The correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sdnder Ferenczi, 1908-14, vol. 1, transl. Peter T. Hoffer, Cambridge, Mass., London, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1994, pp. 584, £27.50 (0-674-17418-6). Over the past few years a number of the major exchanges of letters between Sigmund Freud and his psychoanalytic collaborators have appeared. Slowly but surely a clearer and more accurate portrait of the formation of psychoanalysis has become available to scholars interested in working from the first-hand documents, rather than their partial quotation in monographs, such as Ernest Jones's three volume biography of Freud. Two such projects have recently appeared in English with Harvard University Press, both elegantly edited and handsomely produced. The exchange of letters between Sigmund Freud and the Welsh physician and psychoanalyst Ernest Jones reveals Freud at his most political and most canny. The exchange, while it does touch on a number of interesting problems in the theories of psychoanalytic interpretation and praxis, is of primary interest as a document of the building of a profession. Jones was a difficult, political figure, whose intellectual abilities were of less importance to Freud than his role (first) as an ally in the English-speaking world and (second) as his buffer from the English-speaking world. This is not to diminish Jones. His study of Hamlet was the first major psychoanalytic study of that important work and formed the basis for much of the applied psychoanalytic criticism in Great Britain and the United States through the 1950s. His biography was the most comprehensive study of Freud by a contemporary. Like many of these texts, such as the first biography of Freud by Fritz Wittels, it now has come to have a major place as a primary source of information about the myth-building within the inner circles of psychoanalysis during the 1920s and 30s. As Phyllis Grosskurth has shown in her important study of the Freud inner circle, Jones had a central role in shaping psychoanalytic politics (through the 1 950s). The letters with Freud are thus a mine of information about who knew what, who was in, who was out, and who could or could not be trusted. The discussions of Jones's own problematic liaisons and life are reflected in these letters to a greater degree than one could have imagined. Freud's awareness of Jones's idiosyncratic sexual life and his warnings about this are clearly present within the work. The editing of this volume is exemplary. The transcriptions and translations by Frauke Voss are polished and professional, Andrew Paskauskas' notes and background material clarify every point one needs to have explained and Riccardo Steiner is, as usual, brilliant and incisive in his work on British psychoanalysis. Steiner, who has published extensively on the inner workings of British psychoanalysis, here provides not only a context for the Freud-Jones letters but what will be a standard account of the pathways of the British psychoanalytic movement through the 1 930s, so very different in its configurations and history than its American counterpart. And this difference can be laid at the feet of one man Ernest Jones. The other letters that have recently appeared are those exchanged with Saindor Ferenczi up to 1914. This first volume of the Freud-Ferenczi correspondence has been "in publication" since the 1 960s. In an extraordinary introduction, Andre Haynal provides not only a context for the letters, but a history of their on-again, off-again publication. Unlike Jones, Ferenczi was one of the most brilliant followers of Freud. One can only compare him with Karl Abraham in terms of his impact on the course of the mainline development of psychoanalysis. While Ferenczi represented Hungary for Freud as Jones represented Britain, Ferenczi was also someone to exchange the deepest secrets arising from self-analysis and the most intense doubts about one's position as a Jew in Central Europe. While the index does reflect the former questions, the complex subtext about anti-Semitism and Jewish identity (as evident in these letters as in the Abraham correspondence) remains unrecorded in the index. Yet this is not an overtly political correspondence. These letters are rarely