The Unimportance of Being Ernest
Adam Phillips
- The Complete Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Ernest Jones 1908-1939 edited by Andrew Paskauskas, introduction by Riccardo Steiner
Harvard, 836 pp, £29.95, May 1993, ISBN 0 674 15423 1
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.
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Letters
Vol. 15 No. 17 · 9 September 1993
From Freddy Hurdis-Jones
Adam Phillips recounts (LRB, 5 August) that Ernest Jones, when his son was born, decided to ‘amplify’ his name to Beddow-Jones, but withdrew the idea in the face of Freud’s scorn. However, I believe the son was later called Beddow-Jones; I was at school with him, at Arnold House Preparatory School, St John’s Wood, between 1933 and 1935 or so. He was a bright, jolly, intelligent little boy, who tried to convert me to Welsh nationalism on the grounds of my being a Jones also; and his main enthusiasm was for the true Cambrian slate-mining dwellers of the North, as compared with the contemptible Silurian coalminers of the South. We were great friends, and even wrote some doggerel together about King John’s loss of his jewels in the Wash. I have no idea what happened to him – doubtless his father sent him to Bedales or Dartington – but I would be very interested to hear further details of his life.
Freddy Hurdis-Jones
Malta
Vol. 15 No. 18 · 23 September 1993
From John Lavagnino
As I know the LRB takes a particular interest in these matters of nomenclature, let me help out with the question posed by Adam Phillips: ‘Who other than Ernest Jones could have defined cunnilingus … as apposition of the mouth to the vulva?’ (LRB, 5 August). The answer is Havelock Ellis, in his Sexual Selection in Man, from which Jones evidently cribbed these words – except that Jones preferred to write ‘vulva’ where Ellis had ‘female pudendum’.
John Lavagnino
Brandeis University, Massachusetts
From Sebastian Kraemer
Freddy Hurdis-Jones can find out about his old school friend Mervyn Jones (Letters, 9 September) by reading his chapter ‘Learning to be a father’ in Fatherhood, edited by Sean French (Virago. 1992).
Sebastian Kraemer
London SW2
Vol. 15 No. 19 · 7 October 1993
From Mervyn Jones
I was touched to read the letter (9 September) from Freddy Hurdis-Jones, my contemporary at Arnold House School. To be remembered by a person whom one last saw in 1934 is certainly a compliment. It’s true that my father, Ernest Jones, wanted me to adopt the surname of Beddoe-Jones (not Beddow-Jones); but I never liked the idea and after leaving school I stuck to my name of Mervyn Jones.
Hurdis-Jones makes a good guess in suggesting that my father sent me to Bedales or Dartington. Actually it was Abbotsholme, another progressive school popular with the intelligentsia of the Thirties. I became a writer and Hurdis-Jones may perhaps have heard of me, as I’ve published 30 books, mostly novels. I have just completed a biography of Michael Foot. If my old friend wishes to get in touch with me, he could write c/o my publisher, Victor Gollancz.
Mervyn Jones
London NW1
