Freud's Free Clinics

1918–1922: SOCIETY AWAKES
truth he was “keen on keeping out of politics,” said the London psychoanalyst
Pearl King. She described Jones as “a little man, decently dressed [who]
kept people on time” in meetings. 15 At one of those well-run meetings of the
British society, Barbara Low and Joan Riviere had engineered a particularly
lively discussion of the Berlin clinic. Even Glover agreed to begin “something”
more or less identical to the Poliklinik. That the question of a psychoanalytic
clinic emerged at all was encouraging to Low and Rivière, but, according
to the analysts’ own records of the meeting, “no definite line was
adopted as regards its formation.” 16 For several years now the analysts had
been without such basic assets as an official place to meet one another for
case conferencing, let alone a clinic. But Jones, who was largely in authority
and still ambivalent about the politically charged issue of free treatment,
would not assent to a tentative plan.
Even during Europe’s inflationary years of 1921–1923, Hugo Breitner and the
Social Democrats’ economic policies stabilized Vienna’s municipal budget
and maintained solvency without resorting to dependency on foreign loans.
In redirecting the tax burden toward those landlords and large businesses that
had remained wealthy after the war and had benefited from inflation, they
generated enough revenue to finance housing and social welfare projects.
Horses and dogs—the finer the pedigree, the higher the tax—were assessed selectively
as were food and drink sold in luxury hotels and restaurants, beer,
posters, entertainment, advertising, and auctions, with a moral charge inevitably
creeping into such determinations. Tariffs on luxuries such as cars,
servants, property, and fancy goods (basically anything but income) largely
replaced indirect taxes from rent and consumer charges. But high culture was
so meaningfully integrated into the Viennese life of workers and bourgeois
alike that operas and concerts were taxed at a lower rate than movies and prize
fights. Landlords and large employers, especially corporate entities like banks
unaccustomed to taxes, were now paying them monthly and the funds were
directed immediately toward public sector expenditures. Businessmen balked
at the luxury taxes and claimed that such government interference would
cause bankruptcies and increase unemployment. In fact, the opposite happened.
The large-scale investment in public works employed blue- and whitecollar
workers by the thousands, and the newly enfranchised Viennese
working-class in turn stimulated the municipal economy. Conservative and
angry, the landlords and industrialists sided with the Christian Socials to dub
the new policy Steuersadismus (tax sadism) since the strategy was, as in fact intended,
shifting much of the fiscal burden from the working poor to the local
moneyed elite. 9 In the new state’s threefold housing policy, rents on preexist-
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