Freud's Free Clinics

1933–1938: TERMINATION
day to find that Boehm and Müller-Braunschweig had effectively convinced
the Medical Council not to harm the Berlin Institute because it would be so
helpful for the Nazi state. The treatment-based Poliklinik, however, had to be
refashioned as a non-Freudian psychiatric center. Boehm and Müller-
Braunschweig accepted the orders, but others were considerably less sanguine.
Even Ernest Jones was skeptical of the outcome. “Two Gentiles,
Boehm and Müller-Braunschweig, have now got in touch with the Nazi authorities,”
he wrote to Brill, “and secured a promise not to interfere with the
Institute or the practice of psycho-analysis in Germany. How much this is
worth, or what conditions it has been obtained on, I do not know.” 8 Within
the next two years Boehm would join Werner Kemper, Harald Schultz-
Hencke, and Carl Müller-Braunschweig, as directors of the racialized
Deutsche Institute für Psychologische Forschung (German Institute for Psychological
Research), otherwise known as the Göring Institute, in honor of
its founder, Matthias Heinrich Göring, and his famous cousin, the Reichsmarschall
Hermann Göring. The Göring Institute was to embody the nazification
of psychoanalysis. In a sense Boehm, in crossing between the psychoanalytic
and political sectors, put himself in a position similar to many of the
original psychoanalytic activists. This time, however, the “cause” was fascism
and the “movement” was exclusion of all non-Aryans, with a heated emphasis
on Jews, homosexuals, and Communists.
Meanwhile, the regime started to round up Jewish doctors in their campaign
against psychoanalysis, and Felix Boehm’s practice of appealing to the
good will of Nazi party insiders became more shrill. Charité (figure 34) faculty
had accused Fenichel of forming a Communist cell within the society.
Rather than focus on Fenichel’s defense, the Children’s Seminar group chose
to disband after his last lecture, “Psychoanalysis, Socialism, and the Tasks for
the Future.” 9 Freud and Adler’s works were burned in a huge public display
of anti-intellectual venom. The Schloss Tegel buildings were seized by the
Mark Brandenburg group of the Nazi SA. Simmel was detained as the former
director of the Socialist Physicians’ Union, and Jones, unusually upset, wrote
to Brill. “Simmel . . . was arrested a fortnight ago but luckily got out of prison
after a few days.” 10 Brill and Jones discussed raising funds to send him to New
York, but Simmel fled for safety to Switzerland. In the middle of this, Eitingon
packed up his private consultation rooms and sent his furniture over to
the Poliklinik where he now practiced, if at all, solely out of his director’s office.
On September 7 he held his last analytic sessions and on September 8 left
to prepare his move to Palestine. Eitingon did renew the two-year lease on
the Wichmanstrasse quarters but sent Boehm and Müller-Braunschweig to
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