Freud's Free Clinics

1933–1938: TERMINATION
in Vienna while others fretted over the clinic’s everyday finances, but everyone
agreed that they were facing an unprecedented kind of emergency.
To alleviate their own distressed financial position, the London society was
ready to rent out the maisonette adjoining the building. Instead, the board
decided to convert it into treatment rooms. 32 Melanie Klein’s work with children
was so influential by now and she had attracted so many new patients
that the expanding Children’s Department required more treatment rooms,
more experienced analysts, and even more analysts in training. She became
the famous theoretician while Marjorie Brierley supervised the caretaker and
the clinic’s general upkeep. The staff suffered, but the society thrived, while
Ernest Jones extended his vacillating reach farther into the grim territory of
the IPA in Austria and Germany.
Even in the middle of the universal disaster Hitler had engineered, Otto
Fenichel’s activist group of psychoanalysts effected a small miracle. They, and
quite possibly psychoanalysis itself, survived in exile precisely because the political
raison d’être they had developed in the 1920s prepared them for the
hostile demands of a capricious and dangerous government. Some, like Reich
and Gyömröi, had sided with the Communists, while others, especially
Fenichel and Simmel, stayed with the rivalrous Social Democrats. As unapologetic
Marxists in an increasingly capitalist world, they were frightened
but not intimidated by the Nazi’s arcane authoritarian practices. Now, with
anti-Semitism spreading as the official state position, Matthias Göring’s cousin,
the famous Hermann Göring, built the first concentration camp to eliminate
offenders. Göring’s racial pandering was so vicious that almost all
members of Berlin’s “wonderful society,” as Radó called it, realized they had
to leave their country in a hurry. Still, they carried their identity as social reformers
with them. By March of the following year the Rundbriefe, that marvelous
epistolary legacy conceived by Otto Fenichel, united the scattered
members of the Children’s Seminar group to track their evolving body of social
and political theory. They used psychoanalysis as a virtual metaphor to
examine life in and around Germany of the mid-1930s, at times yielding to
the smallest details of Marxist speculation and at times striving to render objective
critiques of new theory.
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