Freud's Free Clinics

1918–1922: SOCIETY AWAKES
by Otto Fenichel, Grete Lehner Bibring, and other future psychoanalysts,
most of whom played the piano, joined the Schoenberg Verein. In philosophy
the Vienna Circle (including Rudolf Carnap, champion of logical positivism)
gathered weekly at the University of Vienna between 1925 and 1936 to
examine the relationship between mathematical and psychological worlds.
And in medicine Guido Holzknecht, already a member of the Vienna psychoanalytic
society, pioneered the use of radiology while Clemens Pirquet
founded the theory of allergy. Still conscious of their past, institutions like the
Bildungszentrale (the social democratic center for adult education) and municipal
civic museums sponsored exhibits of Otto Neurath’s pictorial statistics
comparing everyday life after the war to the Vienna of long ago. The
bridge between art and sociology was built on observations about families. Of
all the cultural productions that linked psychoanalysis and Red Vienna, the
new architecture for public housing was to demonstrate that communities
constructed specifically to meet the needs of urban children and families met
essential psychological needs as well.
“The living conditions in postwar Vienna were miserable,” the psychoanalyst
Richard Sterba remembered. “The official food rations were so small
that one had to supplement them on the black market in order to survive....
At home and at the university there was no fuel for heating and the apartments
and classrooms were bitter cold. ... We [all] developed frostbite.” 54
With the number of marriages and new families surging at war’s end, Vienna’s
housing shortage became particularly acute for young people like Sterba.
Returning former imperial civil servants and military personnel, newlyweds
and even small families found themselves subletting rooms or renting
“sleeping spaces” in existing apartments. The demand for housing grew
stronger as workers were evicted from their sublets and left without alternative
housing arrangements. Those tenement buildings where indigent families
remained had neither gas nor electricity, and most residents shared water
and toilets in the hallway. Inflation, unemployment, paucity of private
capital invested in real estate, and drops in real wages added up to a major
housing crisis. Rents had already been capped by the Mieterschutz (tenant
protection, also known as rent control), a government decree of January 26,
1917, designed to shield soldiers and their dependent families from rent increases
and evictions.
At its core Red Vienna, where Freud lived and worked, was “not so much
a theory as a way of life . . . pervaded by a sense of hope that has no parallel
in the twentieth century,” recalled Marie Jahoda, one of the most influential
modern social psychologists. 55 At the University of Vienna’s Psychological
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