Freud's Free Clinics

1926
scription.” He sat down at his desk and wrote. In the meantime, he asked me:
“They told me you have hardly any money and live in poverty. Is that correct?”
I told him my father received a very small salary as a teacher, I had four
younger brothers and sisters, and I survived by tutoring and selling newspaper
articles.
“Yes,” he said. “Severity against oneself sometimes might be good, but one
should not go too far. When did you last have a steak?”
“I think about four weeks ago.”
“That is what I thought,” he said and rose from his desk. “Here is your prescription.”
And he added some more advice, but then he almost became somewhat
shy. “I hope you don’t mind, but I am an established doctor and you are a
young student. Please accept this envelope and allow me to play your father this
time. A small fee for the joy you have brought me with your poems and the story
of your youth. Let us see each other again. Auf Wiedersehn!”
Imagine! When I arrived in my room and opened the envelope, I found 200
Kronen. I was so moved I broke out in tears. 22
“In your private political opinions you might be a Bolshevist,” wrote
Ernest Jones to Freud that year, “but you would not help the spread of Ψ to
announce it.” 23 Jones, as always both deferential and impulsive, tinged their
correspondence with a particularly emotional quality. Here, he bursts out
with his own discovery of the political nature of Freud’s thought. The
spokesman for psychoanalysis divulges exactly that for which he castigates
Freud. But he does not repudiate it. He understands Freud’s fascination with
change and is torn between loyalty to the man and loyalty to the psychoanalytic
“cause.”
The cause itself was far more politically focused than Jones understood it.
By 1926 the IPA’s plans for a network of training institutes and free clinics,
laid out in Budapest in September 1918, had moved forward. The alliance between
socialism and psychoanalysis was sealed in Berlin when Ernst Simmel
was simultaneously awarded chairmanships of the Association for Socialist
Physicians and the German Psychoanalytic Association (Deutsche Psychoanalytische
Gesellschaft or DPG). Next, Siegfried Bernfeld and Otto Fenichel,
still two of the movement’s most politically dynamic members, officially
joined the Poliklinik after leaving Vienna for Berlin. In July Bernfeld summarized
their left-wing position in a comprehensive report delivered to the
Socialist Physicians’ Union. The address, called “On Socialism and Psychoanalysis,”
was attended by Barbara Lantos and Fenichel and most members
of the Children’s Seminars, and was published in a concurrent issue of The
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