Freud's Free Clinics

1930
programs, socialize with the Freuds, and help analysts escape the Nazis. But
in 1930 Jackson was new to Europe and kept to the pleasant routine of a recently
arrived foreign analysand. She took daily German lessons in order to
attend the Institute’s seminars and work with children and dancing lessons
for evenings at the Viennese balls. Every afternoon except Sunday she would
leave the room she rented from Else Pappenheim’s mother and walk to
Freud’s office on the Berggasse. Her analytic session, from five to six P.M., was
held in English. “Working in the presence of Freud’s mind is the most exciting
experience I have ever had,” she wrote to her sister Helen. “I find him a
most lovable personality.” 3 Analysis was difficult and made her moody, but
Vienna’s sophisticated array of evening activities easily cheered her up. All
over the city the lectures, concerts, theater, and opera started at seven or
seven-thirty in the evening. Jackson particularly enjoyed dances like the
Artist’s Ball where thousands of costumed men and women waltzed all night
en masque. The more outrageous the costume, the more gleefully her analytic
friends from the Kinderseminar gossiped about the dancer. The green cactus
costume with a red cactus flower on the cap was her great favorite for the
Concordia Ball. But the mushroom costume, the one she wore herself to the
Concordia Ball (which she attended with another patient of Freud’s) had a
tight vest, an adorable white beret, and a round tulle skirt with the edges
turned up. Meanwhile Jackson’s new friends Anna Freud and Dorothy
Burlingham drew Edith into the life of the Institute and the Ambulatorium
and their own experiments in early childhood treatment. Ernst Simmel, now
a specialist in psychotic disorders himself, invited Jackson to look in on his
team at the Schloss Tegel. Jackson was particularly impressed by the originality
of Simmel’s work. At the “Psychoanalytical sanatorium,” 4 she wrote,
“there are at present only 12 or 14 patients (capacity is 25). I don’t know that
we have any such institutions in America, but I hope we will have. For it is
excellent for people who need analysis to have the benefits of such pleasant
and healthful surroundings with a slight amount of supervision and regulation.”
5 She met Ruth Mack Brunswick, another American analysand on the
staff of the Ambulatorium, who was infusing the clinic’s newest branch, the
Department for Borderline Cases and Psychoses, with enthusiasm for the
treatment of severe mental illness. Brunswick showed Edith her research on
psychosis and her effort (shared by other analysts trained by Reich, Schilder,
and Hartmann) to understand mental illness by interviewing psychotic or
schizophrenic patients.
Wilhelm Reich is perhaps best known today as either an experimenter
about whom people feel somewhat uncomfortable, for his orgone accumula-
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