Freud's Free Clinics

1918–1922
The self-assurance of these auspicious beginnings radiates from the
group’s official portrait (figure 15). Fourteen well-dressed men and women,
the Ambulatorium’s psychoanalytic staff, were formally photographed together
at the back of one of the hospital’s large carpeted rooms, far fancier
than the sterile Herzstation. Wilhelm Reich is seated at the center of the front
row with Grete Lehner Bibring, Richard Sterba, and Annie Reich Pink to his
left. Hitschmann sits to Reich’s right along with Ludwig Jekels, Anny Angel-
Katan, and Eduard Kronengold. Behind them in the second row, Ernst Hoffmann,
Ludwig Eidelberg, Eduard Bibring, Parker, 9 Stjepan Betlheim, and Edmund
Bergler stand against a suite of heavy double doors, all the men
wearing uniformly starched white collars and tweed winter suits. It is a portrait
of the emerging second generation of psychoanalysts, of the young politically
aware analysts favored by Freud to oversee the growth of the psychoanalytic
movement with their publications, clinics, and training institutes.
Of course by 1922 the systematized curriculum for psychoanalytic training
had only started to take hold. Franz Alexander, the first student to register at
the Berlin Institute, likened this process to “medieval medicine when students
gathered around famous teachers.” 10 For him Freud was that model of
15 Staff of the Vienna Ambulatorium: seated (left to right), Eduard Kronengold, Anny Angel-
Katan, Ludwig Jekels, Eduard Hitschmann (director), Wilhelm Reich (assistant director), Grete
Lehner Bibring, Richard Sterba, Annie Reich; standing (left to right), Ernst Hoffmann, Ludwig
Eidelberg, Eduard Bibring, Parker (?), Stjepan Betlheim, Edmund Bengler (Freud Museum,
London)
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