Freud's Free Clinics

1918–1922
continued, “and the primary necessity for its reputation was reliability of diagnosis,”
which Hitschmann fulfilled admirably. 26
Once sanctioned by the Federal Department of Social Administration, the
Ambulatorium (figure 17) thrived for another sixteen years. The clinic grew
to include a training institute directed by Helene Deutsch, a child guidance
center, and a special department for the treatment of psychoses. Deutsch,
whose “great virtue,” her student Abram Kardiner remembered, “lay in her
simplicity and her very sound common sense,” had a gift for teaching psychoanalysis
and thus easily articulated new plans for an educational program.
27 Though at first the official drafts outlined a separation between the
Training Institute and the Ambulatorium, the two legally separate organizations
became virtually interdependent. In fact, once the Vienna Training Institute
was established three years later, the Ambulatorium became the candidates’
major source of supervised cases. While ensuring the quality of the
student analysts’ work, Reich suggested during a planning meeting, the Ambulatorium
would serve patients better by broadening its scope to include
regular on-site training programs and informal conferences between students
and their more experienced colleagues. Reich had just completed his
postgraduate studies in neuropsychiatry at the University of Vienna clinic
headed by Professor Wagner-Jauregg. What would work in hospital-based
public psychiatry would be equally effective at the clinic, Hitschmann and
Federn agreed, and so a new series of clinical and lecture courses first called
Discussions on Technique were integrated into Reich’s Technical Seminar at
the Ambulatorium. Hermann Nunberg chaired the meetings for 1922, the
first ten sessions of an exceptional project that would last until 1938 when
everything else shut down too.
Meanwhile the ties between the Ambulatorium’s Child Guidance Centre
and Red Vienna’s social welfare services for children were gaining strength.
Freud had long been taken with Hermine Hug-Hellmuth’s novel childrearing
ideas. “Strict upbringing by an intelligent mother enlightened by
17 Stationery letterhead from the Vienna Ambulatorium (Archives of the Sigmund Freud Foundation,
Vienna)
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