Psychoanalytic thinking gives us the opportunity and vocabulary to describe the complex interactions between the historical, institutional, and familial forces within which we emerge and mature as users of language. It helps us appreciate the constitutively fluid psychic consequences of our histories and cultural locations as these are lived hour by hour. And it can alert us to the variety and complexity of our shifting feelings regarding the languages we speak, those we may aspire—or alternatively feel forced—to speak, and those of which some feel, with evident historical justification, robbed or deprived.Footnote ¹ This essay selects a small but surprising instance of such complexity as it follows Ernest Jones in suggesting that the English language inflicts specific psychic damage on one comparatively small set of its native monolingual speakers—those raised in England.

In “A Linguistic Factor in English Characterology,” read to the British Psychological Society in March 1920, Jones argued that the “striking insistence on propriety” that he took to be characteristic of the English as a nation might be explained by the coexistence within their language of Saxon, Norman, and Latin words (256). He explained: older Saxon words retain for English speakers a capacity to arouse the strong images and feelings characteristic of primitive languages, while newer English words, derived first from Norman French and then from Latin, are more abstracted and remote—and therefore more detached—from such feelings. Activating the passions less, Latin and Norman words facilitate greater intellectual abstraction, allow for a “valuable saving in expenditure of emotional energy,” and comprise a reservoir of terms with which the English can express forbidden ideas while avoiding the feelings that would otherwise attach to them. It is to this “double stratum” of earlier Saxon and later Norman and Latin words that the Englishman's stiff upper lip can be attributed, for where it is “unusually easy to give vocal expression to forbidden ideas in a way that inhibits the development of feeling,” there feeling will “be more readily and extensively inhibited” (260). “The suggestion I make,” Jones concludes, reminding his audience that England and its culture are the result of successive waves of colonization, “is that the development of the outstanding English character trait of propriety has been fostered by the peculiar nature of the English language, one resulting from the success of a Norman adventurer some thousand years ago” (261).

Jones drew here on an essay he had translated into English, Sándor Ferenczi's “On Obscene Words” (1916). It addresses a problem Ferenczi encountered in his psychoanalytic practice: at a certain point treatment stalls because patients are waiting for permission to utter the obscene words that have occurred to them in relation to proscribed sexual activities. Here it is no use following Freud's advice to use technical medical expressions because the repression pertains to the phrasing itself of the sexual thoughts, and can be reversed only by uttering those same magic words: the unconscious thoughts and feelings of one of Ferenczi's patients could not be realized in the analytic setting until he could get beyond the term “flatus” and say “fart” (114).

Why is it easier “to designate the same thing with one term than with another?” (115). Ferenczi proposed two explanations for the uncomfortable feelings that certain words arouse, and on the grounds of which they are judged obscene. First, popular “mother tongue” terms for sexual activities and excretion remain intimately connected with infantile sexual theories because such terminology was the only one available to the child. The censorship that later comes to bury these thoughts in the adult mind is exerted on the particular linguistic formulations of the child's earlier hypotheses. Second, certain words have the power to revive visual memory images, forcing the hearer to picture the objects they denote in their “substantial actuality” (137). Ferenczi speculates that these disturbing terms are words that were repressed before the child had fully developed the capacity of representing wishes by replacing visual images with speech signs. In “The Unconscious” Freud built on this suggestion to argue that, in terms Jones used to simplify Freud's thought, “What repression really effects is that the discarded idea is not to be expressed verbally. Patients often say that what they glimpse cannot be put into words” (E. Jones, Years 326; see also E. Jones, “Recent Advances” 180).Footnote ² Or, as Ferenczi could have said, what is glimpsed cannot be verbalized except by using the obscene terms that reawaken what Jones calls the “image version” of the repressed thought (“Linguistic Factor” 257).

Using a gesture characteristic of the emergent discipline of psychoanalysis, Jones looked for confirmation of these ideas in what was then being reported about the “less cultivated human beings” of the world (257). Drawing on the work of James Frazer in Taboo and the Perils of the Soul (1911), he noted that some human societies “take an extremely materialistic view of words,” which they treat as objects with magical powers. Observing that English obscenity laws also regard “the utterance aloud of heinous words” as being “equivalent to a nefarious deed,” Jones then argued, still following Freud and Ferenczi, that “all words originally possessed distinct motor and perceptual qualities, which they gradually lose more and more completely in the course of mental development” (257). As a society matures, or as a child grows, uncomfortable thought-images are detached from words, which, as a result, themselves become increasingly abstract. Such thoughts survive, however, in the unconscious, in a non-abstracted form that remains close to perceptual imagery. So when, in modern life, there is a need to express strong feeling, the psychic apparatus can make “recourse, through regression” to those obscene words that have retained their motor and perceptual elements (259); and where there is a need to inhibit feeling recourse is made “to the use of abstract, or at all events less-familiar words” acquired in later years (260).Footnote ³

So far Jones had said nothing that was original or startling to his audience, but then he came to his point, which was both: whatever the numerous, individual, biological, and ethnological forces are that make for psychological repression, it must be enabled by the ready availability of one of the main instruments by which it is carried out. That instrument is, as Freud had argued, language. And since, in the particularly efficacious form of their historically stratified language, the English have owned this aid to repression for nearly a thousand years, it is to this cause that we may attribute their propensity to propriety: a trait that is noted “not only by practically all foreign observers, but also by Americans and our fellow-subjects from overseas, not to speak of the ‘Keltic Fringe’ in our own islands” (261).

Published in the International Journal of Psycho-analysis, of which Jones was founding editor, “A Linguistic Factor in English Characterology” has been met with resounding silence. Perhaps this reflects what looks like a false step in its reasoning: if the English language produces an inflated sense of propriety in its speakers, why is this trait confined to the English, and not shared by Americans and English-speaking colonial subjects within and beyond Britain? This problem diminishes, however, when the paper is read in the context of a broad academic tradition that linked ethnography and philology with such circumspection that, as John Forrester points out, it could “be actively opposed to a naturalism that tried to unify biological ‘givens’ with philological findings” (Language 178).Footnote ⁴ In Jones's hands this tradition allows for the argument that every language draws from, and expresses, psychological characteristics that are shaped by the social environments and institutions of the communities within which it is used. Like his contemporaries, Jones seldom hesitated to speak about ethnographic types; but he also, as Freud noted in a letter to Jung, “denies all heredity; to his mind even I am a reactionary” (qtd. in Maddox 63).Footnote ⁵ As Jones might have argued: if the Americans are not known for their propriety, it is because the varied historical cultures of the American people, together with the contemporary institutions to which these have given rise, have involved the stratifications of the English language in an entirely new set of social and political concerns.

Even so, there is something strange about “A Linguistic Factor in English Characterology,” and I like to imagine the other members of the British Psychological Society trying to take it in. Did they wonder, as I have done, if it could be a joke?Footnote ⁶ But at the expense of whom? Of the English, who use the wealth of synonyms stored in their language to impoverish their lives and amplify the discontents of their civilization? Or is the target, perhaps an unconscious one, Jones's relation with the father of psychoanalysis, here lending a parodic tone to his extension of Freud's thought?Footnote ⁷ Such questions aside, did Jones's audience concur that “propriety” was the English national trait, and recognize that, as Jones claimed, it marked them out for notice? Did they accept his further contention that the English fear of betraying emotion is correlated with coldness, a damaging tendency to prudishness, and “the absence of social gifts” (256)? And how did they receive this diagnosis from the brilliant, multilingual, grandiloquent foreigner, Welshman Ernest Jones?

Jones was born in a semi-industrialized part of South Wales in 1879. His mother, whom he described as being “in every way Welsh,” had wanted to call him Myrddin, a variant of Merlin; but, as he records in his autobiography, his Welsh-born father took “a decidedly English view of life” and insisted he be named after Queen Victoria's second son (Free Associations 12). To his regret Jones did not learn to speak Welsh, though he remembered two words his Welsh nurse had taught him for the penis, one “in a flaccid state, the other in an erect” (30).Footnote ⁸ He later ascribed his own “unusual capacity for double loyalties, with little tendency to divided ones” to his equal love of both parents and the countries for which they stood: “I should find it hard to say whether I have loved England or Wales more” (13). A few years in London as a medical student made Jones feel he had “almost ceased to be a Welshman,” and he largely dropped his Welsh accent in favor of the received pronunciation of the British establishment (73). But after a glittering start as one of the most successful candidates the Examination Boards had ever seen he was publicly shamed and professionally ostracized for using sexual language with young patients (145–52; see also Maddox 44–47, 58–60).

Forced to leave England, Jones spent 1908 to 1912 setting up a medical and psychoanalytic practice in Canada, and began his long association with Freud, who, as he told Jones in a letter, found him “the most skillful, powerful and devote[d] helper psychoanalysis could have found in the New World” (Letter to Ernest Jones [22 May 1910]). On his return to London in 1913 Jones found the medical establishment still locked against him, but the growing importance of psychoanalysis and his own rising position as its English-speaking face secured him a psychoanalytic practice and a position of significant standing outside the practice of medicine. By 1919 he was acting chair of the Council of the British Psychological Society, and founder of its Medical Section (Forrester, “1919” 45).Footnote ⁹ In 1917 a brief marriage to the famous Welsh musician Morfydd Llwyn Owen “reawakened” Jones's interest “in the institutions, language, and scenery of Wales.”Footnote ¹⁰ Owen died in 1918, and in 1919 Jones married Katherine (Kitty) Jokl (1892–1983), a German Jew raised in Vienna at the edge of Freud's circle. As Kitty remembered, Jones's loyalty to Wales intensified as he got older: in 1925 he joined Plaid Cymru, the Welsh Nationalist Party, and they had their daughter Nesta taught to speak Welsh (K. Jones 273).

Jones's autobiographical description of his experiences at an elite Welsh high school gives frank account of what it was like to grow up in one of England's internal colonies. While the boys at Llandovery College were recruited from the principality of Wales, its masters were English, and “they never let us forget their opinion of our native inferiority, from which our only hope of redemption was through emulating the Herrenvolk [master race] whose outposts they were” (Free Associations 45). Jones's reaction “was by no means simply a resentful one, since I could see it had much justification: we were indeed an uncouth lot, among whom codes and ideals were few and far between” (45). Accepting the judgment of his masters, but undaunted, Jones made quick and effective study of their codes: “In consequence I have always taken a considerable interest in the psychology of the English and have felt enough admiration for them to be able to feel their points of view and predict their reactions better than most of them, with their remarkable inarticulateness, are able to express” (46). Jones felt that this early lesson in accommodating, rather than assimilating himself to, an English point of view put him in a position of intellectual mastery over the Herrenvolk: “The English are notoriously hard to understand—they really are a peculiar people—and I must be one of the few foreigners who have entered into their arcana” (46).Footnote ¹¹

But some were suspicious of what they sensed of Jones's capacity for “double loyalties” and the “imperiousness” to which it gave rise (Maddox 14).Footnote ¹² Freud and his immediate circle identified an “inborn tendency to intrigue and crooked diplomatic means” about Jones that they quickly ascribed to his “Celtic” nature (Maddox 74; see also Freud, Letter to Ernest Jones [31 Oct. 1909]). In 1908 Jung wrote to Freud, “Jones is an enigma to me. Is there more to him than meets the eye, or nothing at all? At any rate, he is far from simple, an intellectual liar” (qtd. in Maddox 66). Freud replied, “I find the racial mix in our group most interesting. He is a Celt, and hence not quite accessible to us, the Teuton and the Mediterranean man” (qtd. in Maddox 74).Footnote ¹³ Freud later described Jones to Eitingon as “a disagreeable person, who wants to display himself in ruling, angering, and agitating, and for this his Welsh dishonesty … serves him well” (qtd. in Maddox 195); while on hearing of his speedy remarriage Joan Riviere, who was in love with Jones herself, furiously told him in a letter “I have realized that the old you is still there, the ‘Celtic’ quality as I call it, the unreliability. It is impossible to take you seriously” (qtd. in Maddox 156). In an obituary for Jones written in 1958 D. W. Winnicott gave a more nuanced account of what even he admitted had been something “strange” and “stinging” in Jones's personality, something that seemed “like an attack in defense” and could leave interlocutors feeling intellectually put down.Footnote ¹⁴ Suggesting that Jones's “Celtic quickness” was “not always to be matched by a similar quickness” in others, Winnicott recalled that this “could easily lead to a moment of awkwardness, in which there was a sense of something having gone wrong, when in fact all was well” (304).

In his careful reconstruction of the transference and countertransference that could occur at a meeting with Jones, Winnicott speaks as an Englishman who, encountering a bicultural, colonial subject, finds himself in the dark, being judged, and unable to tell if the encounter is going well or ill.Footnote ¹⁵ The implied English reader of “A Linguistic Factor in English Characterology” is in the same position. At first glance the talk seems to be given from the epicenter of the British Empire, offering a shout-out to “our fellow-subjects from overseas,” as well as to those of the “Keltic fringe” (256), who, together with the Americans, are in an advantageous position to understand the peculiarity of the English, since they share a common language but not the ancestral trait of propriety. Jones includes himself, as well he might, among the “literary men” of England who easily recognize the difference in “feel” between Saxon and Norman or Latin words; and it is as a staunch Englishman that he pretends to look abroad for terms that would adequately describe the English “horror of self-display, vaunting, braggadocio, gasconade, rodomontade—one sees that we have to use foreign terms to indicate attitudes so foreign to us” (256).

But already things are not sitting right. In its opening paragraph Jones's argument twists and buckles as if encountering powerful causes of disturbance. The first is manifest in “Keltic fringe,” a term he fingers with quotation marks and an esoteric capital K, as if to warn his audience that its use is freighted with a political history that he is prepared, as a Welshman speaking in London on an ostensibly neutral subject, to bracket out. But a second disturbance is deliberately caused, for where he pretends to simply name the grandiloquence that the English deplore, to the point that their language has no name for it, what he actually demonstrates with his list of “borrowed” terms (vaunting, braggadocio, gasconade, rodomontade) is the enlarged capacity for self-display that English—with its “store of synonyms unequalled by that of any other European Language”—actually allows. In the grandiloquence of his assertion, in English, that English does not know how to perform grandiloquence, Jones marks his achieved mastery of—and also his capacity to deform—the protocols of the language in which he has been raised and educated.Footnote ¹⁶

And there is, of course, another shoe to drop. For Jones notes that where a psychologist like William McDougall might interpret “proneness to reserve” in the terms of social psychology, and see it as a flattering indication that the English have a commendable lack of “self-regard,” a psychoanalyst like himself would suspect this same reserve of being a reaction formation: “That something is being actively controlled or avoided is fairly evident . . . [we] would probably ascribe the traits to a reaction against more than one complex, repressed exhibitionism being perhaps the most prominent” (256). Far from being the symptom of an admirable group instinct, English propriety reveals itself to the psychoanalyst as an inverted form of libidinally motivated self-display. Those in the audience who had read Freud's thoughts on exhibitionism could not have failed to recognize the extent of this insult to William McDougall and the social psychology for which he stood. Exhibitionists, suggested Freud in 1905, “exhibit their own genitals in order to obtain a reciprocal view of the genitals of another person” (Three Essays 157); while in a footnote added in 1920 he linked exhibitionism to the castration complex and concluded that exhibitionism is “a means of constantly insisting upon the integrity of the subject's own (male) genitals, and it reiterates his infantile satisfaction at the absence of a penis in those of women” (157n).

Since they were the only two scheduled to speak that day Jones must have anticipated that McDougall would be present. McDougall had been on the Cambridge Torres Straits Expedition with Charles Myers and W. H. R. Rivers and was, with Rivers, one of the founding members of the British Psychological Society. Although he had declined to join Jones at the founding of the London Psycho-Analytical Society, he considered himself to be a cautious adherent to the cause of psychoanalysis. He had had a brief analysis with Jung, had welcomed Jones at a symposium of the British Psychological Society in 1914 (where they spent an entire morning analyzing one of McDougall's dreams), and in 1918 had established, with Thomas Saxty, the Oxford Clinic for Nervous Diseases, which used “experimental, analytical methods” on its out-patients (Forrester, “1919” 60). McDougall's appearance at the British Psychological Society that day was by way of farewell as he was on his way to the United States to take up the William James chair of psychology at Harvard. Is it possible that Jones could have wanted to poke fun at such a colleague, on such an occasion?Footnote ¹⁷

When, in the immediate aftermath of World War I, Freud and other psychoanalysts turned to the problem of group psychology, they saw group behavior as characterized by irrationality, intolerance, illogical kinds of thinking, and the marked deterioration in moral standards that suggested a reversion to primitive levels of behavior. The premise of McDougall's work, by contrast, was that group organization such as is found in the Church and the army “counter-acts” man's “degrading tendencies” and is the “great enabling influence” of ethical health (McDougall 48–61). The book McDougall had in press that day, The Group Mind: A Sketch of the Principles of Collective Psychology with Some Attempt to Apply Them to the Interpretation of National Life and Character (1920), gives account of the “race” tendencies, and the ancient and modern histories, that led to the formation of the psychological characteristics of the different modern nation-states (Britain, France, Germany, and the United States). And here McDougall argues that the best and most highly developed nation, within which personal freedom is both secured and sublimated within the higher interests of the group, is Britain, whose happy state he relates to the ancient, stable, and well-blended racial mix of Saxon, Celt, and Norman that produced the English character, dictated the nation's institutions and social forms, and allowed the one to amplify the other (189–92).

In McDougall's eyes the characteristic traits of the English are “independence” and “self-reliance” (222–31). Expressed in the political, religious, and family organizations of England, and thereby accentuated with every passing generation, it was, he argues, this “innate” trait, together with their propensity for hard work and “effort,” that had enabled the English to achieve their “marvels of colonization and tropical administration” (231). The Welsh and Irish Celts are, however, specifically excluded from his admiration: clannish, excitable, and prone to enthusiasm, having not been part of “that intimate mixture and blending with the Anglo-Saxon stock which has produced the English,” they remain as “an element which seriously disturbs the harmony of the national mind” (235–36, 171).

How could Jones have resisted? In a very brief, popular essay written in 1929 under the imposed title “The Inferiority Complex of the Welsh,” he cautioned against entering “the thorny field” of national psychology “without surrounding oneself with reservations” (128).Footnote ¹⁸ But here the groundwork had been laid for him: he had only to accept McDougall's distinction between the excitable Welsh and the phlegmatic Anglo-Saxons (a distinction he had often made himself) to be able to reveal the downside of the English national character: the English, it turns out, are suffering from an inability to face their feelings. The accusation was pointed, for experience of soldiers who had returned from the recent war suffering from tremors, seizures, paralyses, and other acute symptoms of shell shock had demonstrated, not only the therapeutic value of abreactive techniques derived from psychoanalysis but also, as Charles Myers told the medical establishment in 1918, “the enormous importance of the study of feeling—alike in observation, memory, thought, decision, and action” for the future of the psychological disciplines (28; see also Forrester, “1919” 41). Several members of the British Psychological Society, including McDougall and Jones, had treated shell-shocked soldiers, and been convinced of the inefficacy and cruelty of requiring them to maintain a stiff upper lip (Rivers, “Address”; Rivers, Instinct; MacCurdy; and Abraham et al.). In pointing out that English reserve is far from being an admirable strength—that it is, on the contrary, an expression of envy, anxiety, and lack of self-knowledge—Jones also showed how easily the narratives of psychoanalysis could overturn those of the social psychology for which McDougall stood. And he raised the possibility—one that I think might now be encountered head-on—that the English spoken in England must have had its share in producing the violent perversities of British colonialism.Footnote ¹⁹ At least, in this more local battle of wits, it is not enough to be English to know English. On the contrary, being English robs you of access to the resources of pleasure, knowledge, and healing that are available to others who speak the same language.Footnote ²⁰