Freud's Free Clinics

“THE CONSCIENCE OF SOCIETY”—INTRODUCTION
Erik Erikson, Erich Fromm, Karen Horney, Bruno Bettelheim, Alfred
Adler, Melanie Klein, Anna Freud, Franz Alexander, Annie Reich, Wilhelm
Reich, Edith Jacobson, Otto Fenichel, Helene Deutsch, Alice Bálint, Frieda
Fromm-Reichmann, Hermann Nunberg, Rudolf Loewenstein, and Martin
Grotjahn—these were just some of the free clinic analysts who later fanned
out across the Western world, some carrying the torch of progressivism and
others burying it. Today they are known for their theoretical revisionism and
for the many ways in which they followed, transformed, or broke away from
classical Freudian theory. But in the 1920s and early 1930s the same analysts
saw themselves as brokers of social change for whom psychoanalysis was a
challenge to conventional political codes, a social mission more than a medical
discipline. Erich Fromm, in residence at the Frankfurt Institute of Social
Research in the late 1920s, and Ernst Simmel, head of the Berlin Association
for Socialist Physicians, were Poliklinik analysts who based their practice on
a symbiotic relationship with the political values of the Weimar era. Berlin’s
intellectual freedom afforded Melanie Klein the autonomy to analyze children
in depth. Karen Horney, perhaps best known as the psychoanalyst who
introduced cultural relativism into Freudian theory, was a founding member
of the Poliklinik and the first woman to teach there. For Viennese intellectuals
like Bruno Bettelheim, Otto Fenichel, and Siegfried Bernfeld, steeped in
the romantic activism of central Europe’s left-wing youth movements, psychoanalysis
represented human liberation, social empowerment, and freedom
from bourgeois convention. Erik H. Erikson, the Pulitzer Prize winner
who established, perhaps more firmly than any of the others, the central concept
of the social environment’s influence on human development, was
trained as a psychoanalyst in early modern Vienna, at the Ambulatorium. In
Budapest the clinic’s first director, Sándor Ferenczi, a lifelong intimate of
Freud’s, belonged to a circle of modernist Hungarian intellectuals, poets, and
writers that included the left-wing philosopher Georg Lukács and the composer
Béla Bartók.
Ferenczi, who died in 1933, believed that psychoanalysts who disregarded
the “real conditions of the various levels of society” were forsaking the very
people for whom everyday life is especially painful. In many ways postwar
début de siècle Vienna found psychoanalytic theory and therapy less controversial
than it is today. But almost since its inception and certainly since its
arrival in America, anticlinical clichés have surrounded psychoanalysis from
across the political spectrum. 5 Some critics suggest that individual psychological
investigation precludes environmental advocacy and that psychoanalytic
studies place the individual person at a remove from culture. Others
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