A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE BRITISH PSYCHOANALYTICAL SOCIETY

When Ernest Jones set about establishing psychoanalysis in Britain, two intertwining tasks faced him: establishing the reputation of psychoanalysis as a respectable pursuit and defining an identity for it as a discipline that was distinct from but related to cognate disciplines. This latter concern with identity would remain central to the development of the British Society for decades to come, though its inflection would shift as the Society sought first to mark out British psychoanalysis as having its own character within the International Psychoanalytical Association, and then to find a way of holding together warring identities within the Society.