Freud's Free Clinics

1933–1938: TERMINATION
could still technically practice under the auspices of Göring and Jung’s new
association, the Deutsche Allgemeine Ärztliche Gesellschaft für Psychotherapie
(German General Medical Society for Psychotherapy). The new association
might have persuaded some analysts to stay, but they found its obligatory
new German psychotherapy, where all mental illness was a question of race
and all mental health one of racial hygiene, abhorrent.
And so the exodus began. Annie Reich, now separated from Wilhelm, went
to Prague with her two children. Kate Friedländer and Barbara Lantos moved
to Paris. Fenichel went briefly to Sweden and then to Prague. Theodor Reik,
René Spitz, Berta Bornstein, Hans Lampl, and Jean Lampl-de Groot returned,
temporarily, to the slightly safer city of Vienna. Helene and Felix
Deutsch were already in America, as was Franz Alexander. After the Danish
government refused him permission to open a psychoanalytic clinic in
Copenhagen, Reich again moved, along with Sex-Pol and his resilient publishing
company, to Oslo. Still determined to promote dialectical-materialist
psychology, the heart of his joint work with Otto Fenichel in Berlin, Reich
continued to practice and to promote sex economy, the closely bound aggregation
of sex, psychoanalysis, and politics. At this point Reich’s mind may
have genuinely deteriorated, and he probably knew it. “If I were not so certain
of what I am working on, it would appear to me as a schizophrenic fantasy,”
he admitted to Fenichel and Edith Gyömröi. 28 Reich’s behavior had always
been erratic and, to many, offensive, but he was also powerful and
brilliant and sexy. He was, in many ways, an anxious man who had managed
his depressions and obsessions quite well over the last fifteen years. Whether
one attributes his downward progression to stress caused by forced immigration
or to a characterological kind of paranoid personality, it is important
to separate his politics from his psychology. Reich lived in a world in which
undisguised support for one’s community of friends (especially Freud) included
permission to critique one another’s beliefs. In one sense he thrived
on this. But his ruthless demand for political purity combined with fairly
idiosyncratic research in sex economy designated Reich, in the course of the
next few years, as the problem child. He was targeted by psychoanalysts at all
points along the political spectrum: to the Marxists his focus on sexuality was
too controversial, to Freud he was too Marxist, and to the conservatives he
was too Freudian.
That relentless conservative threat was now bearing down on Vienna as
well. Though it lacked the explicit terrifying power of the German Nazis, the
electoral triumph of the Christian party was cause for concern. Chancellor
Dolfuss suspended the parliamentary constitution, banned the SDAP, and,
262