Freud's Free Clinics

1928
29 Meeting room of the Berlin Society and Institute (Library of the Boston Psychoanalytic
Society and Institute)
tion and, as Felix Boehm later reported, even to remove Simmel’s name from
the doorplate, lest it “do harm to our Institute.” 10 Eventually the whole
building was turned over to Hitler’s government and renamed the German
Institute for Psychological Research and Psychotherapy (Deutsche Institüt
für Psychologische Forschung und Psychotherapie) or simply the Göring Institute,
after its new director, Matthias Heinrich Göring. Even in 1928 Göring
was already embroiled with the Allgemeine Arztliche Gesellschaft für Psychotherapie,
a group of mental health practitioners led by Ernst Kretschmer
until 1933—and by Carl Jung after 1933. But the Berlin institute was still doing
well, in fact thriving, at its new location on Wichmanstrasse.
Erich Fromm was the keynote speaker at the inaugural series of lectures celebrating
the 1928 opening of the Wichmanstrasse clinic. He was the first academic
guest to be so honored. Visiting from Heidelberg, Fromm lectured on
psychoanalysis of “persons of lower middle class” twice, once at the society’s
March meeting and again for Radó’s training seminar. A slim man with neatly
combed thick dark hair and a high authoritative forehead, Fromm struck a
relaxed pose unusual for an academic. He had recently married the urbane
psychoanalyst Frieda Reichmann. Within the last few years Frieda had startled
the Heidelberg medical community with the creation of a private psychoanalytic
sanatorium. Her clinic’s external directors, an intellectual circle
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