Freud's Free Clinics

1918–1922
immediately start divorce proceedings. I discussed all these possibilities with the
woman and told her to think it over. After a few weeks I learned that she had decided
to establish a sexual relationship with her friend and to keep it a secret from
her husband. Her stasis-neurotic symptoms disappeared soon. Her decision had
been made possible by my successful attempt to dispel her moral scruples. 51
A large man who looked scruffy and elegant at the same time, Reich had a
cantankerous style that managed to provoke everybody who spoke with him.
But he obviously had amazing empathy as well, and his experience in the clinics
alerted him to the special needs of adolescents. Neither his work at the
Ambulatorium nor his private practice with disturbed adolescents had prepared
him for the painful situation of the “normal, working Viennese teenager.”
After two years of Sex-Pol, he said, “the conflict between the scientist
and the politician within me grew even more intense. . . . Gradually [I]
learned to understand, to affirm, and to remove the deep-seated and completely
justified mistrust that youth places in everything pertaining to authority
and adults.” 52 Through Sex-Pol Reich defined for himself how social work
was personally and politically empowering. In clinical areas a worker’s purpose
was to advise current or potential clients about the personal costs of repressed
sexuality, and in economic areas about the consequences of oppression.
Reich pushed his advocacy role to the letter. He argued that the labor of
the fourteen to twenty year olds (as factory workers, messengers, or servants)
had already shaped them into adults, and he provided them with Sex-Pol social
work, a blend of psychoanalytic counseling, Marxist advice, and contraceptives.
The following unusually simple case had a pleasing outcome.
A girl of 16 and a boy of 17, both strong and well developed, come to the sex hygiene
clinic, shy and apprehensive. After much encouragement, the boy asks
whether it is really harmful to have sexual intercourse before the age of 20.
“Why do you think it is harmful?”
“That’s what our group leader in the Red Falcons says and everybody else who
talks about the sexual question.”
“Do you talk about these things in your group?”
“Certainly. We all suffer horribly, but nobody dares to talk openly. Just recently,
a bunch of boys and girls left and formed their own group, because they
couldn’t get along with the group leader. He is one of those who keeps saying
that sexual intercourse is harmful.”
“How long have you known each other?”
“Three years.”
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