Freud's Free Clinics

1923–1932: THE MOST GRATIFYING YEARS
survival of their departments (Freud had done the same). But many did not
understand the nature of medical progress and, by enforcing the rules of traditional
practice, prevented new ideas from expanding into Austrian medicine.
From the American Eversole’s point of view, the foundation should give young
Austrian doctors overseas study fellowships. From the perspective of Grete
Lehner Bibring, Reich’s friend from medical school just then finishing up her
residency, the traditional psychiatry and neurology of Wagner-Jauregg’s clinic
was still pedagogically worthwhile. Jauregg’s organic biological treatment approach
was frequently useful as a supplement to psychoanalytic practice, Bibring
found, but his academic conservatism was distressing. And Helene
Deutsch (who had completed her wartime rotation there) warned that treating
illiterate men and women this way resulted merely in their blind submission.
Deutsch wanted to work with “the most hopeless patients, the ones who
had locked up their entire emotional lives deep within them, unable either to
give love or accept it.” She recalled how “they would lie there in their beds,
motionless and mute, as if dead, until after a period of ‘observation’ they were
judged unpromising for further research, given the ominous diagnosis ‘stupor,’
and sent on to an institution for incurables.” Her older, traditional—and
all male—colleagues were convinced that she was wasting her time. But
Deutsch persevered and “learned that one can penetrate the thickest wall of
morbid narcissism if one is armed with a strong desire to help and a corresponding
warmth.” 15 The message was not lost on the Viennese press, and
soon stories about human suffering and psychoanalytic help were appearing in
the popular local journals.
Among the more daring of these periodicals, one of the most open to psychoanalysis
was a Viennese news magazine called Bettauer’s Wochenschrift. In
mid-1923 the Wochenschrift published a series of enthusiastic articles on the
benefits of psychoanalysis available at the clinic. The journal’s “unsolicited
publicity for psychoanalytic therapy,” Richard Sterba recalled, “brought an
influx of patients to the ambulatorium.” 16 Sterba may have actually understated
the magazine’s impact since over 350 men and women applied in 1924
alone. Hugo Bettauer’s novels, plays, and periodicals like Er und Sie:
Zeitschrift für Lebenskultur und Erotik (He and She: A Magazine for Lifestyle
and Eroticism), the Wochenschrift (Weekly), and Bettauers Wochenschrift (Almanac),
all of which popularized psychoanalysis, sent more people seeking
help at the Ambulatorium than therapists had time for. These widely distributed
journals discussed sexuality candidly, called for unrestricted sexual
emancipation, and openly advised psychoanalytic psychotherapy for people
with sexual difficulties. References to Havelock Ellis, Magnus Hirschfeld,
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