The International Psycho-Analytical Library is set up in collaboration with Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press. This is a major example of the 1920s Bloomsbury set’s growing interest in psychoanalysis.
Photo: Karin Stephen and the Woolfs
The first Training Committee of the Society includes Ernest Jones, James Glover, John Rickman, J C Flugel and Douglas Bryan. Formal training will start the following year.
After a long battle, led by Jones and Edward Glover, the British Medical Association (BMA) recognizes psychoanalysis as a 'serious branch of science'.
Photo: 1927 letter from BMA re: investigation into psychoanalysis.
Grace Pailthorpe and Edward Glover set up the Association for the Scientific Treatment of Criminals, soon renamed the Institute for the Scientific Study and Treatment of Delinquency (ISTD). Early members include Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and Otto Rank, and numerous psychoanalysts, such as Marjorie Franklin and Melitta Schmideberg, go on to work for the ISTD.
Photo: Front page of a report by Glover of First 5 years of ISTD.
On 30th January Adolf Hitler is appointed German Chancellor.
In London, the Portman Clinic is formed by the ISTD, with the purpose of treating delinquent and criminal patients using psychoanalytic psychotherapy.
Between 1934-6:
A series of exchange lectures between Vienna and London take place, in an attempt to bridge theoretical disagreements. In 1935, Jones lectures in Vienna and Robert Waelder does the same in London. In 1936 Joan Riviere also gives a paper in Vienna, ‘On the genesis of psychical conflict in earliest infancy’, in honour of Sigmund Freud’s 80th birthday.
Ernest Jones is elected President of the IPA for the second time. In the coming years he will play a central role in helping Jewish psychoanalysts – notably the Freuds and their Viennese circle – escape continental Europe to the US and Britain.
Image: a list of emigres from 1938.
Following the Nazi invasion of Austria – the Anschluss – in March, Ernest Jones and Princess Marie Bonaparte help Sigmund Freud and his family escape Vienna, with the support of the American ambassador in Paris, William C. Bullitt. On 6th June they arrive in London. Among the other European analysts who escape to London are Willi and Hedwig Hoffer, Dorothy Burlingham, and Erwin Stengel.
In the advent of the Second World War, and following the first evacuation of children from London, D.W. Winnicott, John Bowlby, and Emanuel Miller publish an open letter in the British Medical Journal, in which they warn against the long-term damage caused by separating very young children from their parents. These analysts’ experiences of treating evacuated children have a strong impact on post-war psychoanalytic theory (for example, John Bowlby's attachment theory).