Freud's Free Clinics

1923–1932: THE MOST GRATIFYING YEARS
community teachers whose primary and secondary schools had turned to
them for advice on difficult pupils and adolescents with behavioral problems,
in part to educate them on child development and in part to treat the
teachers’ own stress-induced neuroses. With Max Horkheimer heading the
research institute and Meng, Fromm-Reichman, and especially Erich
Fromm on the faculty, Landauer could take the integration of psychoanalysis
and Marxism further than it had ever gone before.
Erich Fromm’s career as a practicing psychoanalyst had started at the
Berlin Poliklinik in 1926. A theoretically minded young man, Fromm was
then as comfortable with philosophers like Horkheimer and Marcuse as with
his left-leaning psychoanalytic colleagues from Berlin, Otto Fenichel and
Wilhelm Reich. Once he arrived at the institute, however, Fromm’s writings
became increasingly critical of Freud. Like Reich, he valorized matriarchy
over patriarchy (while equating Freud with patriarchism) and rejected the
Oedipus configuration outright. In this he differed from Adorno and
Horkheimer who, Fromm correctly believed, found Freud to be “more revolutionary”
because he insisted on candor in regard to sexuality. 17 Later, once
Fromm disengaged his work from the Frankfurt Institute’s advances in critical
theory, Horkheimer wrote to his old friend Lowenthal. “We are really indebted
to Freud and his first collaborators. ... Even where we do not agree
with Freud’s interpretations and use of [concepts], we find their objective intention
is deeply right.” What Horkheimer especially admired in Freud was
his undiluted insistence that individual inner psychology exists per se and is,
at the same time, rooted in the historical moment. For Freud the self is neither
a simple product of the environment nor a mechanistic preformed personality
but evolves in a constant process of redefining the relationship between
inner and outer worlds. Proponents of critical theory gladly listened to
this approach precisely because they thrived on examining the paradoxes and
social contradictions of modern life. They accused so-called revisionists or
neo-Freudians, like the post-Berlin Erich Fromm and Karen Horney, of diluting
the bite of Freudian theory by desexualizing it and imposing a linear
cultural template on the changeable nature of human development. Fenichel
and Simmel agreed, accusing the neo-Freudians of conformity while asserting
that orthodox Freudianism is all the more liberating for its emphasis on
the unconscious and sexuality and for its tolerance of the irrational. Speaking
at Simmel’s memorial in 1946, Max Horkheimer said that Freud and
Simmel were “relentless enemies of intellectual superstructures including the
metaphysical hiding places of the mind. ... They pursued, “ he said dispassionately,
“radical demythification.” 18
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