Freud's Free Clinics

“Psychoanalysis [as] the germ of the
dialectical-materialist psychology of
the future”
1934
“WE ARE ALL convinced,” Otto Fenichel wrote from Oslo in March
of 1934, “that we recognize in Freud’s Psychoanalysis the germ of the
dialectical-materialist psychology of the future, and therefore we desperately
need to protect and extend this knowledge.” 1 So begins the extraordinary
series of 119 letters written between 1934 and 1945 and circulated
between and among a core group of activist psychoanalysts who had met
at the Berlin Poliklinik in the 1920s, fled the Nazis, and remained close
friends and political allies in exile. Otto Fenichel, principal author of the
Rundbriefe, or circular letters, embodied that core’s spirit and the Rundbriefe
tell the story of the psychoanalysts’ evolution from 1934 to 1945, the
activities of its participants, and their larger ideological struggles in Europe
and America. When nine-tenths of the psychoanalysts were forced
to flee Berlin and Vienna between 1933 and 1938, they took with them a
particular humanitarian ideology forged in a curious time. On the one
hand, the new nation states had traded monarchy for participatory
democracy, the Hapsburg Empire had dissolved, and women had gained
the right to vote; on the other hand, there was boundless anti-Semitism,
encroaching fascism, and intellectual persecution. Though classified since
then as politically left wing, or even radical, a designation Fenichel’s
Marxist group would have actually welcomed, they hardly represented a
disaffected “left opposition” in psychoanalysis. For one, all psychoanalysts
were at the least social democratic. Second, as Fenichel recognized,
the exiled group’s ideology stemmed from the same progressive impulse