Freud's Free Clinics

1918–1922: SOCIETY AWAKES
hour. The four young Socialists, already comfortable with Red Vienna’s social
welfare approach to health care, were also unusually well read in psychoanalysis.
Freud must have been pleased by the young people’s knowledge and
by their inquiring attitude because he invited all four to attend weekly meetings
of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Luckily for Reich and his friends,
Freud was by that time selecting “new members on the basis of personal and
professional qualifications and of the lecture given by the prospective member.”
As the society’s chairman, “Freud’s personal opinion was always decisive,”
Helene Deutsch pointed out in her memoirs. 19 Then again, as Erik
Erikson recalled from his own student days in Vienna, the psychoanalytic
movement had amazing flexibility and if “the Freuds felt you had a certain
sense of analysis, you could become an analysand of one of the most outstanding
senior members without any further conditions.” 20
Medical school had brought Reich, Bibring, Fenichel, and Lehner together
but Freud gave them a cause. Since 1902 Freud had gathered around him a likeminded
cluster of protégés, friends, former patients, and current pupils, a
group that would develop into the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1908. “The
closeness to Freud’s work in statu nascendi gave us the feeling of participating
in a major, future-shaping scientific and cultural process” recalled Richard
Sterba, a psychoanalyst whose lyrical renderings of life in the Vienna society
idealize Freud but also evoke a genuine pleasure in his presence. 21 The four
medical students quickly gained favor with the society, all the while observing
how Deutsch, Sterba, and Hermine von Hug-Hellmuth responded to Freud’s
comments or ideas. They were particularly attuned to sociopolitical content in
those Wednesday evening roundtables and even more to the contentious discussions
at the Café Riedl (one of Freud’s favorite Viennese cafés) where the
psychoanalysts convened after the lectures. 22 By the next year Fenichel would
be off to Berlin to work at the Poliklinik, and by 1922 all four partners in the
sexology seminar would take on leadership roles at the Ambulatorium, but the
Wednesday evenings at the Freud’s remained with them forever.
Reich soon applied for full membership in the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society.
He had already turned over his paper “Concerning the Energy of Drives”
but felt sure that Freud would “shake his head and hand it back.” 23 In his
own narrative of personal development as a practicing analyst, Reich dated
his first clinical session to September 15 of 1919. By Christmas he had two patients,
had started his personal analysis with Isidor Sadger, and was also enrolled
in Sadger’s psychoanalytic seminar. Few members of the Wednesday
circle seemed less politically involved than Sadger, and none more convinced
of the absolute primacy of sexuality in human life. Himself haunted by homo-
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