Freud's Free Clinics

1918–1922
The two most significant reports, one from 1923 and one from 1930, showcase
Eitingon’s unerring eye for tracking patterns seen in the Poliklinik patients’
social status, gender, and occupations. Under “occupations,” he listed
lawyers, waiters, a bandleader, a general’s daughter, an architect, factory
workers, captains, and a wide range of students and “bureaucrats.” Artisans
(25 male, 35 female), clerks (22 male, 41 female), civil servants (7 male, 3 female),
teachers (16 male, 19 female), domestic servants and nurses (27, female
only), tradespeople (23, male only), students (12 male including 5 medical,
and 2 female with 1 medical), and professional (medical and academic, 56
male and 59 female) are listed under “Occupations.” Married with no occupation
(63, female only), widow (6, female only), and no occupation (2 male,
8 female) are other interesting categories. “Occupation” is the sole focus of
one statistical table in the 1922 report, while five others cross-list occupation
with age, gender, diagnosis, length of treatment, and treatment outcome. But
the 1930 report attends to occupations far less. Here twenty-two occupations
are counted by number of consultations only. Gender, age, and even length
of treatment are not mentioned. “Bureaucrats” (office workers or civil servants)
sought the most consultations (173) over ten years, and farmers the
fewest (3). Still, that farmers should be counted is all the more interesting given
Berlin’s intensely urban cosmopolitanism. The categories of “no profession”
(249) and “no profession given” (313), both of which could signify “unemployed,”
are listed with high counts. Artists, shopkeepers, and teachers are
equal categories with 124 cases each.
Clinic applicants were counted by gender, age, occupation/profession, and
diagnosis. Some men and women, who were seen only in for an intake consultation
and whose cases did not warrant admission to treatment (or who
were referred elsewhere) were counted separately. Displayed in several forms,
from simple lists (or “classifications”) to rather complex correlations, the
data reveal the Poliklinik staff’s careful (or Fenichel’s obsessive) quantitative
self-study. The numbers of consultations and treatments are listed by year,
then by month. The lists are sorted into tables, which are then correlated to
clinical and administrative factors: cases are counted by outcome (active, terminated,
and interrupted or “fractionary”), by length of treatment, and by
the year in which treatment was completed. In the 1923 report the statistical
tables are scattered throughout the document and used to highlight specific
issues. In contrast, the 1930 report (featuring Simmel, Fenichel, and Karen
Horney’s fairly polemical essays) summarizes statistics in a simple two-page
centerfold. Still, it includes an elaborate table correlating diagnosis, length of
treatment, and treatment outcome.
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