Freud's Free Clinics

1929
from morphine and cocaine addicts and alcoholics begging for treatment,
which mostly I cannot give them, or only at personal sacrifice,” Simmel
pleaded to Minister of State Becker. 7 Clinically, the sanatorium had afforded
indigent people a total therapeutic milieu whose “aim [was] to produce
in our patients responsibility for themselves.” 8 Becker was then the Kultus
Minister, the Prussian minister of art, science, and education who professed
to be responsive to Freud’s work and honored by his annual presence in
Berlin-Tegel. Would Becker and his important officials, however, agree to
future funding of the sanatorium? Freud, who found the Tegel facility enormously
beneficial to himself and more generally to psychoanalysis, resolved
to explain the hospital’s financial predicament to Becker in person. In a special
meeting between himself, the minister, the Tegel staff, and Simmel,
Freud brought back almost word for word, and certainly in concept and in
tone, the final challenge from his Budapest speech. “It is difficult to support
this work by private means alone,” Simmel recalled him saying, “and its future
depends upon whether you, for instance, Herr Minister, help us support
such work.” 9 Ultimately Freud held that, since the representatives of the state
wielded considerable power regardless of the current regime, and that by
definition they would remain unmoved by the plight of the common people,
the analysts were responsible for providing their government with enlightened
guiding principles. And as the hospital’s financial crisis seemed only to
become worse, Freud’s response was to declare the urgency not only of preserving
the institution but also of enhancing it with research and training
programs. Simmel had actually planned to expand the Schloss Tegel facility,
now a semiclosed institution, and develop a locked unit for people with severe
psychoses. But, like most such establishments, the sanatorium was
caught in a three-way confrontation between the psychoanalysts’ experimental
and humanitarian concerns on the one side, establishment psychiatry
on another side, and the market imperatives of private land owners on a
third. The von Heinz family, landlords of the nearby Schloss Humboldt,
largely dispensed with charitable leanings and soon objected to the prospect
of lower property values, for them a far more terrifying prospect than freely
roaming psychiatric patients. “As most people would shrink from the idea of
settling near an establishment for the mentally ill,” the landlord wrote to
Simmel, “the nature and purpose of which, after all, cannot be hidden, my
land would lose its value in an undesirable way.” 10 The government agreed.
Despite Becker’s individual declarations of support for Simmel’s project, the
German government fully concluded, along with the landlord, that such an
institution would harm investment and real estate speculation. Meanwhile
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