Freud's Free Clinics

“THE CONSCIENCE OF SOCIETY”—INTRODUCTION
have virtually made a career of invalidating psychoanalysis as nonscientific
and purely ideological. Psychoanalysts themselves have alleged that clinical
objectivity actually demands distance from politics, social policy, and social
thought. As Wilhelm Reich, one of the field’s most biting theoreticians, observed,
“the conflict within psychoanalysis in regard to its social function was
immense long before anyone involved noticed it.” 6 But Ferenczi and Freud
did recognize this conflict and, by 1910, had embarked on a far-reaching corrective
strategy.
Among the radical changes wrought by World War 1, previously disparaged
political attitudes were suddenly dominant within the psychoanalytic
movement as elsewhere, while the first Austrian and German republics followed
a craggy path into constitutional states. In 1918 Freud might simply
have restated the 1913 principles that systematized his prewar approach to patient
fees, 7 but he foresaw the history of psychoanalytic theory would ultimately
rest on the history of its actual practice. The new democracies would
require of working psychoanalysts, as of other professionals, greater public
involvement and accountability. Accordingly, Freud argued for an alternative
and nontraditional (even then) view of the collective social obligations of
psychoanalysis. The Budapest speech on “the conscience of society” reflected
Freud’s personal awakening to the reality of a new social contract, a new cultural
and political paradigm that drew in almost every reformer from Adolf
Loos in architecture to Clemens Pirquet in medicine and Paul Lazarsfeld in
social science. 8
By the end of 1918 Germany and Austria’s fundamental shifts in size and
political outlook were underscored by the advent of “Red Vienna” and
“Weimar Berlin” as modern models of urban reconstruction. In both cities
the new governments’ policies of aggressive social planning linked postwar
economic recovery to a public works approach where highly original largescale
projects were instituted along with expansive cultural and aesthetic development.
Freud believed that someday “the State will come to see these duties
as urgent,” and indeed the new governments promoted mental health
and social services on a far broader scale than public health care had seen before.
They drew on the new-sprung professions of utilitarian architecture,
public health policy, and professional social work and emphasized the significance
of high culture for the socialist cause. First-hand accounts of life in
Red Vienna, its vast communities of public housing, its social welfare programs
for families, its art and music, share an exhilarating quality of public
commitment and civic pride. Interpretations of these accounts, however, are
endlessly contradictory and ideologically driven, speaking of state intrusion
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