Freud's Free Clinics

1933–1938: TERMINATION
that had guided psychoanalysis after World War I. Third, this group stayed
true to Freud, while the IPA and its branch societies, increasingly oppressed
and factionalized, had become unhappily rigid and more conservative. The
Rundbriefe thus document the actual history of psychoanalysis, as classical in
its own way as Fenichel’s major psychoanalytic text, The Psychoanalytic Theory
of Neurosis.
Of the Rundbriefe’s 119 confidential letters, about half were written from
within Europe until 1938; from 1938 until 1945, from the United States. The
core group—Edith Jacobson, Otto Fenichel, Annie Reich, Wilhelm Reich,
Barbara Lantos, Edyth (Glück) Gyömröi, George Gerö, and Frances Deri—
had convened exactly ten years earlier in 1924 at the Poliklinik’s Children’s
Seminar. These psychoanalytic “children” of the movement, now mostly
scattered into exile around Scandinavia and Europe and eventually the United
States, on the whole welcomed Fenichel’s intellectual and political leadership.
The Rundbriefe consisted of ideological arguments, organizational reports
from branch societies on three continents, psychoanalytic wranglings,
a long meticulously theoretical public disagreement with Reich and shorter
barbs aimed at the purported neo-Freudians, analyses of scientific meetings,
position papers, book and article reviews, political opinions, and gossipy
chatter. Over three thousand pages were exchanged, mostly typed on thin
white paper, double-spaced, carbon copies or mimeographs, each page hand
corrected. Some of the longer letters are really loosely bound packages of information
containing facsimiles of letters between analysts outside the Rundbriefe
circle, newspaper and journal clippings, programs, some with fragments
of earlier circular letters attached. Generally, the letters are long and
laboriously detailed, averaging twenty-three pages and ranging from ten
pages to eighty pages, carefully numbered and serialized, and written in an
inelegant executive style.
Fenichel’s first Rundbrief (figure 35) was dated March 1934 from Oslo; the
one-hundredth issue was issued in July 1943; the last letter was dated July 14,
1945, from Los Angeles. To the initial planners the letters may have been secret
or clandestine. But as the young Martin Grotjahn, then still in Berlin, later
remembered, he somehow knew that his friend Fenichel was writing and
organizing them. He “was a prolific writer who put together drafts of very
long letters, up to 30 pages, sent the manuscripts to his friends who added
their comments, sent the package on, until the letter found its way back to
Otto.” 2 Some of these were shared solely with the core group absorbed in
working out the theoretical issues of psychoanalysis and Marxism. Other letters
had a far wider readership and were directed toward an outer circle, a
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