Freud's Free Clinics

1926
from her father’s, but Freud never joined the group because, as Jenny
Waelder-Hall said, “he knew if he were present, none of us would function.”
14 Challenged by the accelerating numbers of child patients referred by
school teachers and beholden to the Ambulatorium’s mission, the original
seminar grew with wildfire speed and had to be reorganized into three separate,
more manageable courses. The range of cases heard in the technical
seminar on child analysis reflected the census of Vienna’s working families,
from Annie Reich’s case of a runaway child prostitute to Dorothy Burlingham’s
attempt to involve an unschooled mother, a janitor, in the sex education
of her eight-year-old daughter. Outside their common concern for the
public good, very little had prepared the analysts for the class issues welling
up in their work at the clinic. The eight-year-old girl was a perfect example
of their naïveté. When Dorothy advised the mother to discuss sex with her
daughter and explain “why it is useful and not dangerous,” Waelder-Hall recalled
from the case conference, the janitor let loose. Nasty pictures might be
fine for the fancy analyst’s children, she railed, but she cleaned a house full
of bachelors, and who knows what her little girl would do! The small patient
fled the Ambulatorium and just as fast the analysts realized that they had to
acquire a whole range of new skills for working with families, school teachers,
guidance counselors, and social workers. Small wonder that Adler’s desexualized
child counseling was meeting with such success among the Social
Democrats. Adler’s course on psychoanalytic pedagogy flourished precisely
because it abated the prevailing discomfort (then as now) with the ideas of
childhood sexuality, aggression, and fantasy among teachers of young children.
Childhood aggression was viewed less critically by August Aichorn,
also a member of the seminar, and his empathic responses to troubled children
made him a vivid teacher. Aichorn led a seminar subsection on adolescence
and delinquency, and ran it from his own little clinic in the basement
at 18 Pelikangasse.
Because they were so poor, indigent and working-class adolescents were
usually the last patients seen by municipal guidance counselors even though,
as Aichorn and Reich knew well, their distress signaled more than just a
troubled stop on the way to adulthood. Even capable parents became abstracted
when their teenagers talked about the inevitable anguish of growing
up, a personal torment that seemed to engulf all of family life in suffering.
Aichorn and Adler, in contrast, were fascinated by adolescent depression
and, now that their therapeutic approaches were better known, other therapists
started building on their methods. As it happened, Professor Schroeder
of Leipzig University’s neurology institute decided to open an adolescent
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