Freud's Free Clinics

1923–1932: THE MOST GRATIFYING YEARS
Social Party and would (and could) remain in Vienna through the war and beyond.
Aichorn’s gift was his deep unyielding empathy for troubled children.
He treated them with compassion and respect, and he was the most likely psychoanalyst
to pull together the various schools of child psychotherapy. Upon
his occasional absences his colleagues Editha Sterba and Willi Hoffer continued
the Child Guidance Center’s work of evaluating and treating young school
children referred by the welfare services. For most analysts dividing up the
work day posed no problem, and many taught in the morning, analyzed patients
in the afternoon, and in the evening attended seminars and clinical presentations
at the Vereinigung. But best of all, the society really felt like a refuge.
“The Berggasse is the center of everything,” Anna Freud observed, “and we revolve
around it sometimes in smaller and sometimes in larger circles.” 6
The Berggasse salon drew Siegfried Bernfeld for a brief visit to Vienna from
Berlin in January. Bernfeld’s shock of dark hair and angular features enhanced
an already powerful presence and his audiences were quite taken with
his lectures on child neglect, adolescence, aggression, and sexuality. At one of
the Vienna society’s winter seminar meetings, Edith Jackson, whose future in
American child psychiatry would use Bernfeld’s theories to alter conventional
medical care, found him “a marvelous speaker, clear, fluent, precise and
picturesque with humour that bubbles up through the easy flow.” 7 Neglect is
not a simple concept, he insisted. 8 A neglectful family’s sociological milieu,
or environment, is so profoundly influential that two children who might
start out with identical psychological dispositions are each affected very differently.
At the end of the seminar two male teachers asked Bernfeld exactly
how to respond when adolescent boys request advice on sex. Should they
have intercourse or not? Do masturbation, abstinence, or early intercourse
cause any permanent harm? In the developmental course of puberty, is there
a normal sequence for erotic thoughts, masturbation, homosexual activity,
and heterosexual activity? Bernfeld would not be lured into such banalities.
The truth, he insisted, is that these generalizations are impossible because all
human development is a joint product of the individual’s family history plus
their socioeconomic status.
Bernfeld may have overemphasized the theme of individual aggression (or
misread his audience) in his lectures on adolescence. Many Viennese analysts
found it quite galling and dismissed it as the present thinking of the “Berlin
School,” preferring Anna Freud’s current perspective. Between the late 1920s
and 1936, when she would publish her classic book on The Ego and the Mechanisms
of Defense, Anna Freud reframed the role of the ego and granted it
eminence in human psychological growth. She also insisted on respecting the
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