Freud's Free Clinics

1934
cation of psychoanalysis, Adler pedagogically and Reich in mental hygiene.
Interestingly, separated from the workers movements of Red Vienna, their
theories became markedly more removed from social factors. Adler’s educational
theories were championed by America’s overvaluation of individualism,
while Reich’s bioenergic research and theories of sexual liberation were
taken up by later countercultural and radical therapies.
The Ambulatorium, however, seemed to have great staying power even
when Red Vienna’s outlook was at its lowest. Otto Isakower, a psychiatrist
who had worked in Wagner-Jauregg’s clinic with Paul Schilder and Heinz
Hartmann during the late 1920s, joined Hitschmann and was installed as
deputy director of the Ambulatorium in 1934. During his psychiatric rounds
at the public hospital, Isakower met and hired Betty Grünspan, one of those
extraordinary veteran nurses who labored on the front lines of disease as vigorously
against syphilis and tuberculosis in the local hospital as against the
cholera and spotted fever on the Serbian front in World War I. Like many of
her friends among the modern Viennese New Women, she was constantly
seeking out fresh challenges and decided to become a physician and specialize
in surgery. In the mid-1920s Grünspan followed Tandler into leadership
of the public health offices and chartered a continuing education school for
graduate nurses. In addition to her teaching, she directed surgery and aftercare
at the Am Steinhof Hospital and so habitually observed the mental
processes of psychiatric patients. The effects of training notwithstanding,
psychotic suffering is particularly vivid to clinicians who watch closely, and
Betty Grünspan resolved to study psychoanalysis in order to develop treatments
for psychosis. She attended the institute’s training seminars on Pelikangasse,
analyzed adults and children, and, in one of those curious twists
of fate, lost her post as municipal physician but remained a psychoanalyst at
the Ambulatorium, exactly the opposite of the earlier governmental decree of
“physicians only” for the Ambulatorium. There Grünspan’s combination of
skills and independence attracted the attention of the American pediatrician
and child analyst Edith Jackson who would found, license, and finance the
Jackson Nursery. 15 Only a woman with Grünspan’s personality would have
the strength to take over as assistant at the Ambulatorium in 1937, the clinic’s
last intrepid year before the Anschluss.
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