Freud's Free Clinics

1918
3 Freud and Ernst Simmel
at Schloss Tegel (Freud Museum,
London)
Simmel drew on his two years of intense field experience as superintendent
of military psychiatry to develop the vivid interpretive diagnoses and treatments
he described at the conference. In 1918 Freud arranged to have Simmel’s
observations published in a short but striking book, the first volume issued
by the new Verlag. 35 “As a result of this publication,” Freud said later,
“th[is] Psycho-Analytical Congress was attended by official delegates of the
German, Austrian and Hungarian Army Command, who promised that
Centres should be set up for the purely psychological treatment of war neuroses.”
36 By now only a few conservative psychiatrists still thought of neurotic
soldiers as deviant or disloyal, and complaints of severe anxiety, phobias,
and depressions accompanied by trembling, twitching, and cramps were
viewed as genuine signs of illness.
Sándor Ferenczi’s interest in war neurosis had military origins as well. The
Hungarian government had acclaimed Ferenczi’s work with psychologically
injured soldiers early in the war. Initially a regiment physician on duty in the
small Hungarian town of Papa, Ferenczi was transferred to Budapest and
made director of the city’s health services for soldiers with psychiatric disorders
in 1915. The chief medical officer of the Budapest Military Command
23