Freud's Free Clinics

1931
Faced with censoring rejection from within the IPA and with surveillance
and penalty (or worse) from outside, Fenichel “called all left analysts in
Berlin together in order to discuss,” in a take on Lenin’s famously pragmatic
question, “what was to be done.” 4 The IPA actively sought to moderate Wilhelm
Reich, Otto Fenichel, and their Children’s Seminars group’s resolutely
left-leaning approaches to therapy of internal and external worlds. Fenichel
was removed as editor of the Zeitschrift and Reich’s 1931 article on masochism
was rejected without a disclaimer. But the IPA offensive only solidified their
position. The group began to meet, regularly though informally, at Reich’s
house. For the first time since 1919, when Reich, Fenichel, Lehner, and Bibring
had convened after Julius Tandler’s class to discuss controversial topics
outside Vienna’s mainstream medical curriculum, the two leaders found
themselves recreating the structure of a leftist caucus. Recently returned from
a study trip to the Soviet Union, Fenichel helped the group integrate Reich’s
formulations into a Marxist-Freudian synthesis, plan rejoinders to the increasing
political conservatism in the psychoanalytic journals, and explore
the possibility of a new organization. In 1931 the friends could still devote
their evening discussions to investigating the relationship between psychoanalysis,
religion, and education in order to make clear the hazardous impact
of what Fenichel dubiously called the “bourgeois-analytical viewpoints.” After
1933, however, the group would assume a new appearance: it became a
loosely organized network of psychoanalysts in exile, unified by their belief in
psychoanalysis as dialectical materialism and bound together by Otto
Fenichel’s epistolary energy until 1945.
As the campaign against psychoanalysis (and other modernist venues) intensified
in Germany and Austria, the Budapest city government seemed to
rediscover its interest in the free clinic it had abandoned more than a decade
earlier. On December 18, 1931, the municipality granted the analysts permission
to open a polyclinic called the Allgemeines Ambulatorium für
Nerven- und Gemütsskranke (General Ambulatorium for Nervous and
Mental Patients). 5 Even after a full year of negotiations, the Ministry of
Public Welfare still felt obliged to pacify the entrenched psychiatric establishment.
“Since psychoanalysis is not an independent science but a part of
general psychology and neuropathology,” the local Budapest official said,
“the [psychoanalytic] Association must express this in the title of the polyclinic.”
They agreed to call the clinic “simply a clinical agency for nervous
and emotional illnesses in which, among other things, psychoanalysis is
practiced,” Ferenczi wrote to Freud. 6 In the end, the same government that
had so vociferously impeded the clinic now inaugurated its opening with a
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