“A Piece of Psycho-analysis”: The British Response to Later Dynamic Psychology

Abstract

In 1909 Sigmund Freud wrote to Ernest Jones, a native of Britain, that

I consider it is a piece of psycho-analysis you are performing on your countrymen… you are not to say too much or at too early a moment, but the resistance cannot be avoided, it must come sooner or later and it is best to provoke it slowly and designedly. (22 February 1909, Freud, Letters to Jones)

Regarded in a broad way, the Freudian body of doctrine which I have already ventured to describe as essentially an embryology of the mind gives one the impression of being mainly descriptive and systematic rather than dynamic, if one may with due caution use such words.

— Wilfrid Trotter, Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War 1916, 89