Freud's Free Clinics

1933–1938: TERMINATION
types, Ernest Jones seemed delighted. “Boehm saved psychoanalysis,” he
wrote to Anna Freud. 18 The Dutch psychoanalyst van Ophuijsen was more
skeptical and wondered if such extreme measures were necessary. To him,
both Boehm and Müller-Braunschweig were confirmed Nazis. But Anna went
along with Jones. ”I hope you will overcome all your difficulties in the near future,”
she wrote to Boehm after hearing from Jones in October. 19 Paradoxically,
Jones did mount a large effort to rescue analytic refugees, secure emergency
funds, and disperse them around the world. As early as April he started
a series of presentations to the British society that revealed the deep contradictions
in his character and beliefs. First he proposed a “vote of sympathy”
and discussed practical assistance for their colleagues, including “the possibility
of German analysts finding work in England.” 20 By June he announced that
Maas, Cohn, Fuchs, and Jacobson would be welcome to settle there. 21 Maas
had pledged to establish “a sanatorium run by German psychiatrists who had
an English and American clientele,” and, as Jones told Anna, he found possible
“connections to the Clinic promising.” 22 But privately Jones complained
to Brill that, since none of the analysts had “enough money to go to America”
and he had no idea how they would earn a living in England, this “distressing
time with the German refugees” threatened to overwhelm the resources of the
British society. 23 Jones insisted that his steadfast support of Boehm and
Müller-Braunschweig’s compromise with Göring should not be understood
as an abandonment of his fellow analysts.
By the end of 1933 Berlin’s latest form of psychoanalysis was well on its way
toward unity with Germany’s new official medical association. In what reads
like an obituary titled “The Psycho-Analytical Movement,” Jones (as IJP editor)
described how, “with the changed political situation in Germany, the
German Psycho-Analytical Society and the Berlin Psycho-Analytical Institute
(Policlinic and Training Institute) came to an end. Most of the members left
Germany.” 24 By the time Jones published his dreadful news, only nine Jewish
analysts were left in Berlin. What made this news such a travesty of truth,
however, was that the Berlin Institute did not technically close in 1933. Instead
it was aryanized, the teaching and training staff purged of Jews, the clinic’s
operations and principles absorbed into Nazi ideology. With most of the
Jewish analysts gone into exile, Matthias Göring launched the racially streamlined
German Medical Society for Psychotherapy, made himself president,
and promoted Carl Jung to vice president.
On May 1, 1933, Matthias Heinrich Göring joined the National Socialist
Party. 25 He belonged to five other Nazi organizations as well, three of which
were extreme right-wing arms of the Nazi movement. He joined the SA and
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