How many neurotic New Yorkers of the kind that populate the films of Woody Allen would be aware of their debt to the little man from Gowerton who made ‘analysis’ and the ‘shrink’ so indispensable to their daily lives?

The young Ernest Jones turned down a place at Cambridge University to study medicine at Cardiff. After qualifying as a doctor his interest focused on the emerging discipline of psychiatry. Attitudes towards mental illness had hitherto been simplistic, not say barbaric.

In 1908 Jones organised the world’s first psychiatric conference at Salzburg in conjunction with Carl Gustav Jung. It was a hugely significant event, bringing

the leading experts of Europe together at the feet of Sigmund Freud – the father of Psychoanalysis.

So smitten was Jones that he learned German, the better to understand Freud’s ideas. Through lectures and papers he spread the Freudian word through Britain and North America He was also first to spot the disagreement between Jung and Freud that would eventually split the psychoanalytical movement in two.

In the 1930’s as the Nazis marched into Austria, the Jewish Freud was forced to flee his home at Vienna. Ernest Jones assisted in his relocation to England.

Jones was Freud’s official biographer writing two laudatory volumes and jealously keeping control of the great man’s personal papers until his own death.

Freud and the analysis he pioneered were among the most important intellectual developments of the 20th century. Their influence, though waning perhaps in recent years, extends beyond the consultation room into business, government and the media.

The Freudian lexicography includes terms like ego and libido that have grown into popular idioms by which people understand themselves and their actions. Jones contributed to this pool of understanding with “rationalisation” - the psychological term describing excuses made for things a person feels uncomfortable or guilty about,