Freud's Free Clinics

1921
would combine supervised home visits to indigent families (Hauspolikliniken)
with some regularly posted office hours, usually near a university hospital.
At the Charité, socially aware psychiatrists had organized the first
specifically psychiatric polyclinic and linked the external clinic to the hospital’s
neurological ward. 14 By 1909 the number of free or low-fee patients enrolled
at the Charité had grown to six thousand annually, with twelve staff
physicians attending to the clinic’s hugely expanded mental hygiene and social
responsibilities. Special care was offered to children, alcoholics, and people
with sexually transmitted diseases. By the turn of the century, German
psychiatrists succeeded in revitalizing their profession by combining innovative,
state-of-the-art treatment on a one-to-one patient basis with communitywide
mental health. This promise of a better kind of care for mental illness
fit perfectly with Freud’s 1918 Budapest image of the free clinic. Eitingon understood
that the polyclinic model would diminish outside hindrances to
psychoanalysis, attract both the middle and the lower classes, provide for the
kind of intense clinical observation needed for basic scientific research, and
leave room for questions of social welfare and mental health.
Ernest Jones (figure 13) saw no such thing. Until the Stracheys arrived back
home from Berlin in 1922, Jones rebuffed the idea of building a clinic in London.
That the larger political issues simply escaped him was, in itself, a sign
of Jones’s own position of privilege, as was his sense that he could persevere
indifferent to the implications of social class on English psychoanalysis. In
13 Ernest Jones, checking his watch
(Photo by Eduard Bibring, Archives
of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society
and Institute)
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