Freud's Free Clinics

1923–1932: THE MOST GRATIFYING YEARS
30 percent who might find their way to his clinics was inadequate. The Communists,
who later repudiated Reich, as did the IPA, decided to subsidize the
new Deutscher Reichsverband für Proletarische Sexualpolitik (German Association
for Proletarian Sexual Politics). According to his second wife, Ilse Reich,
the Reichsverband drew in more than twenty thousand members with a
campaign very similar to Hugo Bettauer’s popular crusade in Vienna: better
mass housing, legalized abortion and homosexuality, free birth control and
contraception, sex education, employer-based child care, and health insurance
for mothers and children. 9
In most matters Reich’s political beliefs were those of the Viennese Social
Democrats, taken further to the left but based in the idea of building feasible,
specific social programs like housing and health care. The relationship between
Reich and Freud was intense, ambivalent, and, by the 1930s, combative.
Freud did have a political mission, the mission of the Social Democrats
who implemented their idea of a centrally planned, redistributive state in
Austria of the early 1920s. While Freud made it clear that “political unrest and
economic misery certainly have the right to draw people’s attention first and
foremost to themselves,” as he wrote to Ferenczi, personally he held off from
overt involvement in a specific political movement. 10 Yet his disinclination to
support outright “the Communist ideal” did not preclude him from having
a political agenda since he “remain[ed] a liberal of the old school,” as he
wrote to his friend Arnold Zweig. 11 In fact, identification with a movement
other than psychoanalysis would have blurred his agenda for human liberation.
Reich understood this. For all the criticism he gave and got throughout
his life, Reich spoke of Freud with admiration and excluded him from his
general condemnation of psychoanalysts (who had, after all, ejected Reich
from his own professional association). Former friends like Paul Federn and
Otto Fenichel eventually proved disloyal. Ernest Jones blamed him for vicariously
deceiving their leader and for shifting psychoanalysis away from private
clinical practice to the wider political arena. “I am extremely sorry that
so many members in Berlin and Vienna who had boycotted the only scientific
Congress for Sex Research,” 12 Jones wrote to Eitingon, “should nevertheless
be reading papers at the unscientific popular Congress for Sexual Reform.”
13 But like so many of Freud’s followers, from Melanie Klein and
Ernest Jones onward, Reich saw himself as the lone champion of the true
master and their interpersonal conflicts as merely human obstacles to the scientific
progress of psychoanalysis. By 1930 Reich had switched to a more
flamboyant rhetoric that would eventually alienate some of his closest
friends, and Sex-Pol seemed to veer off on an increasingly left-radical path.
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