Welsh Journals

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Llandovery College and from there went to study medicine at Cardiff University, where he qualified as a doctor in 1900. As early as 1902 he was using hypnosis in treating patients and was probably the first doctor outside Germany and Austria to use Freud's techniques of psycho-analysis. He met Freud in 1908, thus beginning a lifelong friendship, and it was Jones who in 1938 was largely responsible for helping Freud and other analysts too to escape from the Nazi regime and so come to live in London. From 1911-13 Jones was in Canada as Professor at the University of Toronto and there he published his best-known psycho-analytical works on Hamlet and nightmares. During the First World War he returned to England and did clinical work on mental illnesses. It was in 1916 that he met Morfydd Owen, a talented musician from Trefforest, and they married in 1917. Tragically, she died of appendicitis at Swansea the following year and was buried at Oystermouth. Ernest Jones was proud of being Welsh and regretted not being able to speak his native tongue. He even boasted of being able to pronounce correctly the name "Llwchwr" — no easy task! He once said with regret, "In 50 years I have trained students from Chili to Japan but never one from Wales." He is not remembered today as a deviser of any new psycho-analytical treatment or for his clinical work but as an editor, organiser and administrator, having been President of the British Psycho-Analytical Society from 1920-40 and President of the International Association, 1920-24 and 1932-49. He greatly influenced the development of psycho-analysis throughout the world, and had great talent in drawing attention to the work of Sigmund Freud. He showed his great love for his native Gower when, at his request, his ashes after his death in February 1958 were brought from London to be laid on his daughter's grave at Cheriton. This world-famous man had finally come home to rest! Note 1. This map, together with Dr. Gwent Jones' account of meeting Dr. Ernest Jones at Tv Gwyn, appears in GOWER IX (1956) pp 54 & 55.