In this ‘hidden’ history, psychoanalytic ideas were in wide circulation significantly before Jones’ standardly accepted claim to have been the first to grasp their importance and his aborted initial attempt to institionalise them, fleeing London in professional disgrace to continue his proselytising in Toronto. Amongst ‘Mind Healers’, as Kuhn calls them, of all stripes – sexologists, asylum psychiatrists, hypnotists, experimental psychologists, progressive educationalists, spiritualists, Cambridge philosophers, anthropologists, economists, botanists and figures who would soon find fame as the Bloomsbury literati – early twentieth century Britain witnessed an extraordinary enthusiasm for the ‘new science’ of psychoanalysis. Specialist interest permeated into coverage and debate in the popular press, so that psychoanalytic idioms readily made themselves comfortable within the everyday speech of homespun-wisdom and folk-psychology, heard in conversations in shop queues and at bus stops, in towns and cities across the country. The phenomenal popularity of Tansley’s 1920 book, should alone attest to the appetite for all-things psychoanalytic in diverse circles of the period, extending far beyond the leisured curiosity of the upper-middle-classes.
Forrester and Cameron write of the ‘discovery’ of the early history of psychoanalysis in Britain, although they might better have written of its ‘rediscovery’, which is closer to the sense of what they are in fact at pains to convey. Because even if ‘the Jones Account’ – as Kuhn sarcastically refers to it – is still popularly accepted and widely repeated (for instance, it is referenced in the second sentence on Jones’ Wikipedia page) both studies make plain how much of the broad outlines of the ‘revisionist’ history, has long been available if only we had bothered to look for it and speak it up. Many of the major landmarks of this context, to which the Forrester and Cameron and Kuhn studies contribute new additions and supplement with rich detail, have been well known for at least the last twenty years.
Largely, this is thanks to Bob Hinshelwood’s path-breaking 1995 article, ‘Psychoanalysis in Britain: points of cultural access 1893-1918’. However, public record of the early history predates Hinshelwood by at least fifty years. For instance, already in 1945, in his memorial to David Eder – Zionist, socialist and, almost certainly no matter what Jones may have insisted upon, the actual first person in Britain to practice psychoanalysis in the narrow ‘classical’ sense of that term – Edward Glover would recall in vivid detail that:
The later course of psycho-analysis in England differed from that followed in other European countries. That it ultimately secured a large measure of acceptance and prestige in lay quarters was due to a considerable extent to the attitudes of certain young intellectual groups. In the early ‘twenties, for example, an open-minded attitude to psychoanalysis was an essential part of the equipment of any young Cambridge post-graduate having pretentions to cultural development. Not, by the way, that this was true of his academic mentors, who remained as atrophic in imagination as any other habit-ridden animal. There were, of course, many other groups and many discerning individuals ready to offer intellectual hospitality to the new ideas. And so in the course of time Freudian theories percolated in a bowdlerised form, from the gardens of Hampstead and the squares of Bloomsbury, to the drawing-rooms of Kensington. Soon they were to find their way to the maid’s pantry. Everywhere and everyday in bus, tube, and the editorial columns of popular daily newspapers a new jargon has come to life – ‘wishful thinking’, ‘complexes’, ‘repressions’, ‘inhibitions’, ‘sublimations’, ‘inferiority feelings’, etc. (Glover 1945: 92-93).