Freud's Free Clinics

1925
lower. Freud, it seems, always sided with Max whereas Radó, Jones, and even
Ferenczi cast a dim view of their colleague. True, in the postwar inflationary
economic climate, Freud sought out wealth in his endless quest to relieve the
chronically impoverished psychoanalytic movement. But his attachment to
Max was real, and the history of their entente cordiale, as he wrote later in
1931, was borne far more of genuine fondness and political beliefs than cynical
rapacity. “In your quiet and irresistible way,” Freud hailed Eitingon on his
fiftieth birthday, “there was no task, however difficult and thankless, that you
did not take upon yourself . . . and did not bring to a successful conclusion.” 9
The task of increasing the Poliklinik’s clinical capacity had become urgent,
and both Eitingon and Freud understood the need to staff it with socially
conscious psychoanalysts. Luckily Siegfried Bernfeld, a prominent figure in
Vienna’s progressive education movement, agreed to move to Berlin. “Dr.
Bernfeld should be taken into consideration, a first rate man, a brilliant
teacher but who keeps his distance from the pathological,” Freud had recommended
as early as 1920. 10 The “pathological,” of course, meant individual
psychopathology, and Freud’s figure of speech revealed a noteworthy
awareness of possible left-wing opposition to individual clinical treatment.
Berlin’s local Communist Party in particular criticized psychoanalysis for its
focus on the individuals’ responsibility for personal success or failure at the
expense, they thought, of the class struggle. In May the mainstream Berlin
press resumed their attacks on psychoanalysis. 11 But Bernfeld, Freud suggested,
was careful not to blame individuals in analysis for their own psychological
condition, and instead focused on stressful social conditions that provoked
the patient’s anxiety. Part of the complicated political setting that
persuaded Freud to send Bernfeld to Berlin was Ernst Simmel’s increasingly
popular Association for Socialist Physicians that included mental health in its
agenda for public health activism. New publications like the Der Sozialistische
Aerzte (The Socialist Doctor) made it all but impossible to ignore that
psychoanalysts were recognized among medicine’s left-wing activists. Now, if
a critic accused the analysts of pandering to the rich, they could point to Simmel’s
inaugural issue. “Ever since the society of socialist doctors was founded
twelve years ago,” Simmel wrote, “ we hoped to bring together all doctors
who believe in the socialist idea. Today our organization has been consolidated.”
12 In 1925 alone, in addition to the journal, the Socialist Physicians’
Union sponsored public lectures on social hygiene laws, invited Alfred Adler
to speak on individual psychology, and brought Julius Tandler from Vienna
to speak on “Medicine and Socialism.” Tandler, they hoped, would help
them attain their primary goal, an overarching structural reorganization of
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