Freud's Free Clinics

1923–1932: THE MOST GRATIFYING YEARS
a widespread demand for psychiatric social workers,” announced the 1919–
1920 annual report of the Smith College School for Social Work. Jarrett even
hired lecturers known for their connections to the Berlin and Vienna clinics.
The prestigious faculty included Bernard Glueck, a New York psychoanalyst
openly interested in treating people with psychiatric illness. “I have been very
busy the past few months organizing a hospital for nervous and mental disorders,”
Glueck wrote to Eitingon in 1928, “where I hope to be able to use
psycho-analytic methods in connection with patients that are not entirely suitable
for office practice.” Similarly, William Alanson White, who built St. Elizabeth’
s into a great psychiatric hospital in Washington, D.C. while advocating
for far-reaching prevention of mental illness, was a Smith social work lecturer.
On his official trips to Europe, White had been impressed by the widespread
shift in perception of war neurosis, from the military and psychiatric establishments
alike. In fact, even before the war he and Pearce Bailey had advanced
“the recognition of mental disease as a possible form of injury resulting from
the operations of war.” But when White later visited Berlin’s Charité, he returned
to the U.S. firmly persuaded that all soldiers, from the newly drafted
soldiers to veterans already suffering from “mental disabilities which were the
result of military service,” should be screened by mental health professionals. 18
Taken aback by this striking evidence of war’ s impact on human psychology,
even Abraham Brill, founder of the New York Psychoanalytic Society, and
Adolf Meyer of Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, agreed to join the rotating faculty
of the Smith College School for Social Work. Margaret Powers was a student
in their graduating class of 1918.
By the time she reached the Poliklinik in 1928, Powers already had acquired
a broad background both in psychiatry and as a child welfare worker with the
State Charities Aid Association, one of the Charity Organization Societies
(COS). In the unpopular role of home investigator for families applying to
adopt, she nevertheless focused on the concerns of the children who remained
in foster care until their legal adoption. She disliked the moral tones
of self-righteousness that alienated some of her social work colleagues from
the poor, largely immigrant families on New York’s Lower East Side, who
were their clients. Neither was she under any illusion of virtue in poverty, and
if children were beaten, starved, or prostituted by their parents, they had the
right to alternative—and better—families. Powers went to Berlin because the
Poliklinik’s design was uniquely suited to the mental health needs of urban
families in her native New York. A popular lecturer on psychiatric social
work, she established the first professional social work department in the division
of psychiatry at Cornell University Hospital. She also instituted clini-
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