16 May 1927  81 Harley Street  London W1

Dear Professor,

Though the gratitude I owe you for many years is too great to be adequately expressed, I have from time to time indicated it in both words and actions.  And I am writing today to express once more some of it, the recent debt being by no means the least.  It concerns my children.  Since September they have, with the exception of some weeks of holidays and illness, been analyzed, and I expect it will be finished in another two or three months.^[1]  The changes already brought about are already so striking and so important as to fill me with thankfulness towards the one who made them possible, namely yourself.

Though we had brought them up as wisely as we knew how, neither child escaped a neurosis, which analysis showed, as usual, to be much more serious than appeared.  The symptoms of moodiness, difficulties with food, fears, outbursts, and extensive inhibitions seemed to make it worth while, and now I am extremely glad.

The girl proved to have a severe castration complex, intense guilt and a definite obsessional neurosis.  The boy was very introverted, lived in a babyish dream world, and had an almost complete sexual inversion.  They have responded excellently to treatment, are in every way freer, and are constantly gay and happy.  It is plain that they were helplessly struggling with infantile conflicts that otherwise could only have ended in an unsatisfactory compromise, at considerable cost to the personality.

These and several other experiences have convinced me that early child analysis is the logical conclusion of Ψα in general.  Just as prophylaxis is in general better than cure, both easier and more effective, so in regard to the neuroses it is surely more sensible to deal with them when they are being formed, still in a plastic state, than after the mind has become set and organized on an unhealthy basis and at great cost.  I do not know what exactly you think about it, but there are no doubts at all in my own mind.  The purely theoretical and academic objections sometimes raised, e.g. about the stability of the child's super‑ego, etc., are completely answered by the test of experience, and I wonder if they are not sometimes displaced from a lingering doubt about the reality of the phenomena and the richness and capacity of the child's mind.  All our experience shows how right were your conclusions in attributing to the infant a far greater maturity than had been suspected.

It is a pain to me that I cannot agree with some of the tendencies in Anna's book,^[2] and I cannot keep thinking that they must be due to some imperfectly analyzed resistances;^[3] in fact I think it is possible to prove this in detail.  It is a pity she published the book so soon ‑‑ her first lectures, but I hope she may prove as amenable as her father to further experience.  This hope is strengthened by my admiration for all her other qualities ‑‑ also analytic ones.

May I ask you if you have made your plans for September?  Is there any chance of your visiting the Congress?  If not, I shall try to visit you immediately afterwards?  Semmering.

I am very well and full of energy, as is all my family.

With my kindest regards  Yours deeply grateful and affectionate  Ernest Jones

P.S.  There were some serious mistranslations in my contribution to the Symposium, so if you read it I hope it will be in the corrected version.^[4]

^[1]           Freud would have understood that Jones's children were being analyzed by Melanie Klein.  The comments regarding this letter generally, and this passage in particular, in Grosskurth (1986, pp. 171‑172), are highly tendentious, and distort the historical context of Jones's relationship to Freud.

^[2]           A. Freud (1927a).

^[3]           On Freud's analysis of his daughter Anna, see Young‑Bruehl (1988, pp. 103‑139).

^[4]           Jones is likely referring to his contribution to the "Discussion on Lay Analysis" (Jones, 1927c), as the entire "Symposium on Child Analysis" in the German version appeared only as a review (Fenichel, 1928).