Freud's Free Clinics

“As a social-democratic town councilor,
Dr. Friedjung has furthered our
interests as psychoanalysts”
1931
MARTIN GROTJAHN was already a staff psychiatrist at the Berlin-Buch
state mental hospital and, as he later wrote, no exception to the haughty
reputation of university professors when he applied for admission to the
Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute. Grotjahn’s choice was politically significant.
Despite its popularity in Berlin of the 1920s, the status of the psychoanalyst
never really achieved that of the psychiatrist/physician, meaning
that anyone inclined to pursue psychoanalytic training risked harming
their academic career. Conversely, few organizations were more exciting
to a socially minded psychiatrist, whose civic bent was increasingly confined
to secretive meetings and coded plays, than the psychoanalyst’s Poliklinik.
Of course the analysts had their own exclusionary, and some critics
would say elitist, practices. The grueling four-part admissions process
consisted then, as today, of interviews designed to assess the candidates’
personal motivation, capacity for empathy, and general equanimity—and
to screen out individuals deemed unfit to treat others because of their particular
neuroses. Grotjahn never forgot his admissions review. First came
the interview with Max Eitingon, described by Grotjahn as a “shy, small
man with a slight stammer,” who afterward discreetly offered him financial
support. 1 Next came the interview with the clinic’s assistant director,
Karen Horney. Horney’s seven cats slept on the one comfortable couch in
her office and her desk was piled so high with papers and manuscripts that
Grotjahn felt both amused and a slightly wicked need to tidy up. Horney
herself said very little. When Horney left, an elderly bald man with an