Freud's Free Clinics

1932
Crowley remembered how “psychoanalysis was forward looking: it was a rebellion
against old ways and old ideas. . . . The field was full of excitement and
controversy. ... Psychoanalysts were interesting people, devoted, not to
achieving personal and financial security, but to experiment and exploration,
and to the personal growth of themselves.” 10 Unlike Sterba, however, there is
little sense of a wider political endeavor. Perhaps this explains why none of the
American psychoanalytic institutes, except for Chicago and Topeka, advanced
free outpatient clinics. Until at least the mid-1950s the psychoanalytic societies
in Boston, Detroit, Philadelphia, New York, Washington, Los Angeles, and
San Francisco adopted training programs but, as Alexander commented in
1951, “they have restricted themselves primarily to theoretical instruction and
clinical work with private patients.” 11
Two of the other European clinics, London’s and Budapest’s, were
planned with the same mix of voluntarism and financial support as the Ambulatorium.
In London Pryns Hopkins’s Christmas donation included a hint
that he would continue to support the clinic if he could. The clinic analysts,
who did not contribute financially, agreed their work was both voluntary and
separate from their teaching or administrative duties to the institute. These
two decisions came from the board of the British society in its wellintentioned
oversight of the clinic’s plans. In June, for example, the board
agreed that one colleague’s role as translation editor for the IJP could exempt
her from taking on clinic cases. 12 In Budapest, meanwhile, the clinic was
thriving. “We are positively overrun,” Ferenczi wrote to Freud, “and are
striving to master the difficulties that are arising in this manner.” 13 The difficulties
were in large part financial, and, when Freud sent around a special
petition to local society presidents appealing for support for the Verlag (the
psychoanalytic publishing house), Ferenczi reluctantly reminded him that, at
least in Budapest, any extra resources were directed to the clinic. Vilma
Kovács, like himself, had already contributed fourteen hundred Hungarian
pengö each year toward its maintenance. 14 The other analysts earned barely
what they needed to survive: they donated time but could hardly be expected
to contribute cash.
249