Freud's Free Clinics

“These were traumatic times and we
talked little about them later”
1937
A NEW daycare center was Edith Jackson’s answer to several problems.
First, Jackson knew that Anna Freud craved a true research environment
in which to test out her theories on early childhood development, and a
clinical setting in which to conduct long-term observations of one and
two year olds would suit this ideally. As the Nazis closed in more and
more oppressively on the Freuds, and with her father still refusing to
leave the homeland, Anna’s need for new work was palpable. Second,
Jackson was immensely grateful to Freud for her own analysis and wanted
to repay him with a gesture beyond the standard fee. From the meetings
of the Kinderseminar she had attended at the Ambulatorium, she
knew that Freud still supported the idea of free clinics. Even with expanded
facilities at 7 Berggasse, the analysts’ clinic had become seriously
overcrowded. And, third, with the Social Democrats out of office and Red
Vienna’s welfare infrastructure scrapped, the few resources still granted
to poor people had now been taken away. And so, to paraphrase Alfred
Adler in 1919, why not start a new clinic?
Edith Jackson decided that her no-fee day care center (Krippe) for very
small children from Vienna’s poorest families would open shortly. Anna
Freud and Dorothy Burlingham tracked down a suitable working space
for a community-based nursery school or pre-kindergarten. They located
a Montessori kindergarten in Vienna’s first district, just then short on
money and looking to rent out a few of its rooms. The little school, about
half of which now went to the analysts, was built on the pleasant sunny