Freud's Free Clinics

1918–1922: SOCIETY AWAKES
Berlin Poliklinik in 1920, Hitschmann would start a free clinic in Vienna in
1922, and Simmel would establish the Schloss Tegel free inpatient clinic.
Ferenczi opened the free clinic in Budapest somewhat later, in 1929.
Though Ernest Jones could not travel to Budapest to attend the congress
because of war restrictions in 1918, he nevertheless started the London Clinic
for Psychoanalysis in 1926. Melanie Klein, Hanns Sachs, Sándor Radó,
and Karl Abraham were also in that audience and all became key players in
the Berlin Poliklinik.
For the moment the grimness of the last few contentious months of 1918
gave way to political idealism, good company, and renewed confidence in
Freud and psychoanalysis. “Under a walnut tree in the garden of one of those
wonderful restaurants in Budapest . . . [we] chatted confidentially and privately
around a big table,” 25 recalled Sándor Radó of their celebratory mood.
As conference secretary and coleader of the Budapest society under Ferenczi,
the young Radó and his colleague Geza Roheim, the future anthropologist,
were pleasantly surprised to dine so informally with Freud and Anna Freud.
Their conversations continued on the Danube steamer provided by the city
for the analysts’ transportation between their hotel and the meetings at the
Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The visitors were hosted at the splendid
new Gellértfürdö Hotel, still famous for its beautifully tiled thermal baths.
Budapest’s Mayor Bárczy and other city magistrates publicly welcomed psychoanalysis
and graciously accommodated the congress with receptions and
private banquets. Except for the avowed Viennese pacifist Siegfried Bernfeld
and Freud, most of the analysts present in Budapest had enlisted as army psychiatrists
and all attended the conference in uniform. High-level military and
medical officials from Hungary, Austria, and Germany officially represented
their governments’ delegation to the convention and mingled with the families
and guests of the forty-two participating analysts.
Freud’s speech may have been seditious, but it must have been incredibly
stimulating as well because so many of the analysts in the audience became
powerful proponents of the free clinics. Among them the young Melanie
Klein, who saw Freud in person for the first time at this congress, said she was
overcome by “the wish to devote [her]self to psychoanalysis.” 26 Klein would
go on to become the originator of play therapy in child analysis, the framer
of an extended dual drive theory, a truly principled follower of Freud. But at
the 1918 congress she was still “Frau Dr. Arthur Klein” and mother of three,
an analysand of Ferenczi’s and member of the Budapest society since 1914.
Anna Freud and Ernst, Freud’s youngest son who had been fighting on the
front lines for the last three years, would later become immersed in the free
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