Freud's Free Clinics

1930
31 Children’s Seminar analysts on a picnic, “Self-Portrait.” Standing (from left to right), Grete
Bibring, Wilhelm Reich, Otto Fenichel, Eduard Bibring (leaning into the camera), unidentified
woman; sitting (from left to right), unidentified woman, Frances Deri, Annie Reich (Special
Collections, A. A. Brill Library, New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute)
cialist Physicians, the group headed by Ernst Simmel, on the prevention of
emotional problems. As he had in Vienna, Reich shifted among a range of
political organizations but finally decided that expanding Sex-Pol would advance
what he called “sex-political” themes the furthest. The sex hygiene centers
had already registered seven hundred applicants over eighteen months,
Reich reported in a speech to the World League for Sexual Reform. 8 He was
one of the few psychoanalysts to join the German Communist Party and,
perhaps inevitably, his mainstream reputation suffered when the Communists
agreed to underwrite his sex-political organization. Since the turn of the
century, the Communists had criticized psychoanalysis for being too individualistic
and ignoring the economic root of human suffering. But they
agreed with Reich that public health programs ignored mental illness or, even
worse, prescribed routine advice. Seventy percent of the workers’ problems
were too severe for short-term counseling, Reich said, and even treating the
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