21 June 1932  81 Harley Street  London W1

Dear Professor,

Many thanks for your full letter of 17th June.  You were right in reproaching me for not having written to you about the Quarterly at an earlier date and I see it was a mistake on my part.  Actually at the time I heard only that the Quarterly was being supported by Eitingon, Anna and Ferenczi, not by yourself, and you may be sure I lost no time in defending the interests of the JOURNAL.  I wrote strong letters at once to Feigenbaum, Lewin, Zilboorg,^[1] Brill and Eitingon.  There was no point in writing to Ferenczi, whose attitude about American affairs is apt to be somewhat vague, and I assumed Anna was in touch with Eitingon, acting as Secretary and President of the Association respectively.  I am sorry to say I was not able to get any satisfaction from Eitingon either from correspondence or during my visit to Berlin.  He will never see what he does not want to see.  I still find it deeply shocking that the President of the Association should have given his support to the enterprise of a small coterie in their competition with the Official Organ of the Association without first consulting with the Editor of that organ; apart from his official position, I should have expected that much loyalty from him as a friend.  Then a rumour reached me that they were printing one of your papers in the first issue and I at once wrote to you to find out if they were doing this without your consent.«FN1.××See note 3 to letter 588.

»

So much for the actual history of the events, but it is also true that there are deeper reasons which would have made me more disinclined to approach you immediately in such a matter, quite apart from the fact that at the time there did not seem to be any definite reason for doing so.  These other reasons are a constitutional dislike, bred from schooldays, against referring to a senior authority difficulties and disputes with colleagues of one's own generation.  It is in my nature to postpone doing this so long as is possible until I am compelled by circumstances, such as when the authority, as here, himself seems to be taking sides.  It seems to me disgraceful to have to admit that we cannot arrange such things among ourselves amicably, as I am sure we should be able to.  I have evidently too much trust in the good will of my generation.  There is an obvious further reason why I should think it unkind to plague you, who have suffered so much, with troubles from which you should be spared.  I made the same mistake in the Rank affair and concealed from you for along period how badly he was behaving in the vain hope that I might be able to smooth him down, but the only result was that you had to listen to all his complaints about me and none of myself about him.  You can very well reply that you are not spared in the long run, so that we may as well begin with you.  I see that, and although I am not ashamed of that trait in my nature, I recognise that it often leads to unsatisfactory results in practice, especially to myself.

Coming back to the present situation, why I wrote to you so fully in my last letter was in the hope that you might have some helpful suggestions or advice about dealing with it.  That you did not shows me that you find it hard to think of any, and so do I now [that] one is presented with a «MDUL»fait accompli«MDNM».  Nevertheless the situation seems to me so ridiculous that we should have two organs in the same language competing with each other and translating the same work that it is surely imperative to come to some sort of understanding or arrangement.  I am of course continuing to do all I can with the "Americans", but a word from you would carry enormous weight and would be perhaps the only way of inducing them to consent to discuss the situation openly with me.

There was one passage in your letter the meaning of which I was quite unable to get.  You were speaking of having been reproached for having given the English translations once for all and then follows the phrase "so oft wurde mir eingeschärft, dass die englischen nicht die amerik. sind, dass die letzteren frei geblieben sind".«FN1.××See Freud's previous letter: "it has been drilled into me so often that the English rights are not the American rights, that the latter remained free, that I have become used to acting accordingly."»  I have no idea at all what this refers to, but from the tone gather that you feel there is some unsatisfactoriness or possibly even injustice in the difference between English and American translations about which I know nothing at all.  I should be glad to be enlightened here; then perhaps I can do something about it.

I was very interested in hearing about your additions to the "«MDUL»Einführung«MDNM»".  This has been your most successful book from the point of view of beginners and outsiders, and I was glad to hear that you are thinking of extending it.«FN1.××In his previous letter Freud was referring to his «MDUL»New Introductory Lectures on Psycho‑Analysis«MDNM» (Freud, 1933a), which he considered extensions of his previous set of lectures (Freud, 1916‑17).

»  Have you any view about the vexed question of translation?

I shall be very grateful for any help in the disagreeable situation that has been forced on me.

Yours always  Ernest Jones

^[1]           Three of the principal editors of the Psychoanalytic Quarterly were: Dorian Feigenbaum (1887‑1937), Viennese psychoanalyst, who settled in New York in 1924; Bertram D. Lewin (1896‑1971), M. D. 1920 Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore; Gregory Zilboorg (1890‑1959), Russian born, M. D. 1926 Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, N. Y.  All three were members of the American Psychoanalytic Association and the New York Psychoanalytic Society.