Freud's Free Clinics

1923–1932: THE MOST GRATIFYING YEARS
charges had its source in a warm sympathy for the fate of these unfortunates,”
Freud wrote in his encouraging foreword, and he applauded the
“great social value” of Aichorn’s teaching and social work with children. 31
Much later, Anna Freud would reiterate her father’s praise and note in particular
that Aichorn’s efforts confirmed how “all individual development,
whether on social or dissocial lines, was the result of interaction between innate
and environmental factors.” 32 But 1925 was not the first time Freud declared
his support of a project’s underlying political mission, nor even of a
class analysis of criminal behavior. Franz Alexander, whose own psychoanalytic
theories of criminology were widely read by Chicago psychotherapists
treating teen gang members, laughed at claims that Freud neglected sociological
factors. The social democratic psychoanalysts simply did not believe
that forensic psychology alone solved crime. From his student days in Freud’s
monthly seminar, Alexander remembered illustrating the unconscious motives
of delinquency with the case of an obsessed car fan who repeatedly took
long taxi rides, way beyond his means as a waiter, and inevitably landed in
prison. To which Freud responded:
I do not see how this case can throw light upon the essential problem of criminality.
If your patient had been the son of a millionaire, he might have become
a record-breaker and as such a national hero. Only because of his social position
and because he was a poor waiter, he could not give expression to his compulsion
or hobby in a legal way. 33
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