Freud's Wizard

This book is a riveting portrait of Ernest Jones, the brilliant and flawed analyst who was Freud's colleague, impresario, biographer -- and who rescued him from the Nazis. After a near-ruinous start to his professional career, including brushes with the law, Jones piloted himself to become Freud's second-in-command. He did so through prodigious energy, administrative skill and literary ability -- bolstered by wide reading and and acerbic wit. His vast output of books and articles, capped by the three-volume Sigmund Freud: Life and Work, is astonishing. Jones also had the gift of making things happen. He founded not only the British Psycho-Analytical Society, but also the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, and edited it for many years, writing a good part of it himself. The book I have written is not concerned with the comparative merits of Freudian and Jungian psychoanalysis, nor with the future of psychoanalysis in the twentiy-first century. Rather, it is the life story of an extraordinary man -- one of the shapers of the 20th century and a controversy all figure who, in his lifetime and after, drew much criticism for his alleged arrogance, autocracy, dishonesty and, not least, hagiography. I was fascinated to buy the saga of a man who conquered what he described to Freud as "various wrong tendencies in myself" and who went on to achieve a happy and productive marriage. The transition from near-ruin to towering accomplishment is part of the fascination of his life story. - Introduction.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.