Freud's Free Clinics

1919
authors’ Kinderheim work with the child refugees, many under five years old,
starving, handicapped, or traumatized. 15 The lectures were reprinted in the
Zeitschrift fur Psychoanalytische Pädagogik and they still convey the earnest
Austro-Marxist tone and the social service idealism of the first few generations
of Viennese psychoanalysts.
Wilhelm Reich, the second-generation psychoanalyst perhaps most often
associated with political radicalism, was just embarking on his lifelong quest
for a successful fusion of social change and psychoanalysis. His Sex-Pol project
started brilliantly but would ultimately come to haunt him. A farmer’s
son recently discharged from the army, in 1919 Reich was putting himself
through medical school to become a psychiatrist. Muscular, thin, with darkly
darting eyes and a square jaw, Reich seemed perpetually distraught in Tandler’s
classroom. Tandler was still teaching classical anatomy at the medical
school then, though also running the city’s new municipal welfare department.
Both in the classroom and in the city legislature, Tandler inspired his
audience to believe that bringing medical and social welfare expertise to the
service of local government was the highest calling. For Reich, as for his
friends Grete Lehner, Otto Fenichel, and Eduard Bibring, Tandler’s message
was a prophecy. Grete Lehner revered Tandler and thought he would do the
same for politics as for anatomy. He could transform a grueling medical task
into a “beautiful and deeply aesthetic experience,” she said. “Hidden relationships
were suddenly made clear.” 16 His expertise in classical Greek sculpture
offset the grim use of cadavers by turning them into lively illustrations,
exercises, and specimens. One day, when Grete was sitting in the medical
school’s auditorium-style classroom between Eduard Bibring and Reich during
Tandler’s anatomy lecture (figure 5), Fenichel handed her a scribbled
note to pass around to the other students. The message urged them all to join
him in an exploratory new project. Fenichel, an intensely fastidious maker of
groups, wanted to start a seminar to be convened by the students themselves
where they could discuss topics not covered elsewhere in the medical curriculum.
If idealistic students ran their own seminar, Grete thought, they
could examine social relations and debate politics, religion, and sexuality
with Tandlerian precision.
The four young activists set out to unearth modern psychological discoveries
within and outside of the classroom. The University of Vienna’s gray
stone buildings consisted of eight connecting courtyards surrounding a large
tree-lined square where students gathered without apparent constraint. Cafés
serving apple cake under the arcades and, in the summer, beer gardens at
each of the quadrant’s corners were popular, though students especially liked
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