Inquiry: FREUD’S WIZARD: ERNEST JONES AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF PSYCHOANALYSIS

We talk with writer and biographer BRENDA MADDOX about her intriguing history of one of Sigmund Freud’s key “paladins”, Ernest Jones. Jones was a complex man, part of psychoanalysis’ secretive inner circle and one of its great international proselytizers. He was instrumental in getting Freud out of Nazi clutches in Austria and wrote a definitive history of Freud’s ideas. Yet, eventually, he would break with Freud and go his own way. Brenda Maddox’s book is a revealing and sometimes disturbing look at the early days of psychoanalysis and is titled FREUD’S WIZARD: ERNEST JONES AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF PSYCHOANALYSIS.