Much apparently therefore depends on Jones’ stubborn determination to distort the sequence and scope of events, guaranteeing him a pioneering pole-position. Despite the detail that Kuhn brings to support his case against Jones, I personally finished his study feeling that the ‘Jones as villain’ cake was a little overegged. This does a disservice to Kuhn’s exacting scholarship, leaving the reader with a sense that his suspicions and resentments occasionally taint his neutrality and balance as a researcher. There is also not much that is new here – on the Jones score, that is: Jones has long been derided for his many failings and the problems he brought to psychoanalysis, so that I kept longing for something of his personal story to manifest itself. This is the story of the poor-boy from Wales who needed to make a name for himself, to distinguish himself from all the other Ernest Jones’ of Wales. In the end, Jones dragged himself to the top of the pile above the old-money Bloomsbury bohemians making up a rump of the first-generation British psychoanalysts, who had simply waltzed in and made themselves at home as if they already owned the place. Which, basically, they did: Melanie Klein’s first lecture to a British audience was…in the drawing room of Karin and Adrian Stephen’s town house…in Bloomsbury.
Even though psychoanalysis never became a formally established discipline within British universities – unlike many of the other ‘new sciences’ that emerged in the period, such as anthropology – and despite its increasing derision from the medical and psychiatric profession as the twentieth century wore on, its language and concepts have continually proven to be astonishingly vital and durable, well outliving their fashionable moment in the drawing rooms of WC1. Straddling both the exclusive enclaves of intellectuals and finding expression in the folkloric wisdom of popular opinion, psychoanalysis has shown that it is not just a detached ‘Grand Theory’, in C. Wright Mills’ sense. Rather, it is something much closer to the psychological common-sense of an entire epoch, in the way that the language of liberalism – with its talk of freedom, democracy and equality – is so often taken to be something of shared political common-sense, even if we are living through an age that is considerably challenging that notion. Indeed, the ascent of liberalism and psychoanalysis at the same moment in time, are surely not unconnected. As Forrester explained in an interview with Eli Zaretsky in 2012:
In Cambridge in the 1920s, the upper-middle-class elites in the making were wide open to the appeal of a scientistic ‘banner’, under which to advance a technocratic solution to social and epistemic problems: a new science to replace religion, a science based morality, like Darwinism, in the form of Darwinism, to answer the crises presented by the Great War – the collapse of Christian morality and capital, simultaneously. In the 1930s they were to look for answers in Marxism and the ideal of social planning; but in the 1920s it looked as if psychology would supply the answer. In addition, these were the elites that also often took on the liminal position of bohemian lifestyles and moral codes and outlook. (Forester & Zaretsky 2016: 141-2).