Freud's Free Clinics

1922
lower-class patient population resulted in no small part from Ernst Simmel’s
own social activism. This accounted for his work at the Association for Socialist
Physicians with the pediatrician Karl Kollwitz (husband of the German
Expressionist artist Käthe Kollwitz) and, to a lesser degree, his collaborations
with one of Karl Abraham’s favorite pupils, Karen Horney.
If Karen Horney is celebrated as the psychoanalyst who introduced cultural
relativism into Freudian theory, her position as the only woman among the
six founding members of the Poliklinik in 1920, and the first woman to teach
there, has been underestimated until now. Horney’s position as a teacher and
thinker in experimentalist Berlin gave her the perfect context for beginning
to formulate her pioneering ideas on the psychology of women, to question
Freud’s libido theory, and to explore the impact of culture on human development.
She impressed Alexander with “her lucidity and stubborn refusal to
accept current theoretical constructions as facts beyond discussion.” 43 Horney
was a slim woman with wispy blond hair tied back, strikingly large eyes,
and the casual style of the well-schooled. She had arrived in Berlin in 1909, a
medical student whose official studies culminated in 1915 with a highly academic
clinical dissertation argued in the diagnostic style of Kraepelinian psychiatry.
She also supported two other, and often contradictory, roles: that of
upper-middle-class wife and mother and that of analysand, then
psychoanalyst-in-training, with Karl Abraham. Like other Poliklinik analysts,
she would cover patients’ carfare if necessary so that treatment could continue.
44 In her theoretical work Horney endorsed and even embellished on
Freud’s social goals, though she remained less overtly political than many of
her colleagues in Berlin and Vienna.
By 1922, in Vienna Wilhelm Reich’s Sex-Hygiene Clinics for Workers and
Employees, (Sexualberatungs-Klinik für Arbeiter und Angestelle) were
emerging from community outreach efforts that he later subsumed under the
rubric of “sex-political work.” Several days a week Reich and his team of psychoanalysts
and physicians would drive in a van out into Vienna’s suburbs
and rural areas, announcing their visits in advance. They would speak about
sexual concerns to interested persons gathered at a local park. Reich himself
would talk with the adolescents and men, the team’s gynecologist with the
women, and Lia Laszky (Reich’s close friend from medical school) with the
children. Upon request, the gynecologist also prescribed and fit women with
contraceptive devices. The model pretty much replicated the prenatal and
child health stations established by the Social Democrats and sustained by
foreign aid from, for example, the Red Cross. Reich’s overtly political group
probably seemed more subversive. Though chased away or arrested by police
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