Freud's Free Clinics

1926
26 Sigmund Freud’s Circular Letter apportioning funds to the Vienna Ambulatorium (Archives
of the Sigmund Freud Foundation, Vienna)
well-tended parks . . . new workers’ apartments and a number of very interesting
schools for children and adults” impressed a visiting young American
psychoanalytic candidate named Muriel Gardiner. 18
Muriel Gardiner would become one of the most subtle and energetic antifascist
fighters of the era. By the summer of 1934, with the fascists gunning
people down on street corners, Gardiner would become an extraordinary
clandestine rescuer and eventually, back in the United States, protector of the
Social Democrat Otto Bauer until his death. But in the mid-1920s she was still
attending medical school and psychoanalytic seminars. Her memoirs of life
on both sides of psychoanalysis have the effect of introducing today’s reader
to the easy modes of exchange between Viennese psychoanalysts and even between
analysts and patients. “Many features of analysis at that time would
now be disapproved of in the United States,” she wrote in her 1983 memoirs.
Gardiner was born in 1901 to a wealthy Midwestern family. She was a Durant
scholar at Wellesley, active in socialist politics on campus and founder of the
Intercollegiate Liberal League with friends from Radcliffe and Harvard. In
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