The guru, the bagman and the sceptic by Seamus O’Mahony

Welsh-born psychoanalyst Ernest Jones was Sigmund Freud’s closest associate and most fervent disciple. Clever, self-confident and intensely ambitious, Jones promoted psychoanalysis as a kind of secular religion. Meanwhile, his intimate friend Wilfred Trotter – a celebrated surgeon who saved the life of George V, and who took on Freud as a patient during his London exile – refused to yield to the seductions of the new Freudianism. A quintessentially English figure, Trotter was unimpressed by slick medical careerists, distrusted grand theories and lacked pomposity and self-regard. From the first psychoanalytic congress in Salzburg in 1908 to the illness of King George in the late 1920s and the meeting of Freud and Trotter in 1939, Seamus O’Mahony tells the story of these three figures and their intertwined lives with his customary wit and erudition.

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