Freud's Free Clinics

1929
Erikson’s theory actually lies in the tools it gives the therapist for helping individuals
explore their inner worlds.
Anna Freud was running three seminars at the Ambulatorium at the time,
and had taught each of these courses at least weekly since 1926. Nearly every
notable psychoanalyst from Vienna attended either her informal Kinderseminar
31 for younger analysts at the clinic, her weekly pedagogy seminar on
merged psychoanalytic and educational techniques (largely drawn from her
work at the Heitzing School) or her Technical Seminar on Child Analysis at
the society’s Training Institute. In her tireless pursuit of explanations of
childhood psychological disorder, Anna invited experts on each stage of the
life cycle to make presentations to the senior analysts who sat around a table
while junior analysts sat behind them or stood. Aichorn, for example, taught
adolescent psychology and juvenile delinquency. At another seminar Willi
Hoffer presented a full case study of a child in analysis complete with behavior,
dreams, and fantasies. Reich conducted a similar lively program analyzing
case studies of adolescents and adults.
Heinz Hartmann, who was later to preach psychoanalytic orthodoxy under
the guise of “ego psychology,” had just returned to Vienna from several
years at the far less conventional Berlin Poliklinik. Hartmann and his colleague
Paul Schilder promoted a dual, or synthesized, psychoanalytic and biological
approach to mental illness and wanted to test this formula in the
treatment of psychiatric disorders. Despite the omnipresent lure of Wagner-
Jauregg’s powerful Psychiatric-Neurological Clinic where both had trained in
the pathological-anatomical model of treatment, the two psychiatrists hammered
out the plans for a new experimental department at the Ambulatorium.
Specifically designed to treat adults with borderline and psychotic symptoms,
the new section marked a milestone in improved relations between the
psychoanalysts and the medical fixtures of native Viennese psychiatry. Some
fifteen years earlier, during and just after the end of World War I, the psychiatric
approach to adults with forbidding psychological diagnoses had
shifted from accusations of malingering to a more sympathetic treatment of
a disorder called war neurosis. Psychoanalysis had triumphed as the preferred
form of treatment in all but the most conservative medical circles and
had gained remarkable popularity even within military medicine. Presumably
the same might happen now with other disorders. Unfortunately, no
sooner had Schilder inaugurated the special clinic at the Ambulatorium in
March, with plans for a systematic experiment in the psychotherapy of the
psychoses, than he accepted a job offer from Adolf Meyer and left for the
United States. Schilder’s friend Eduard Bibring took over as the clinic’s new
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