Freud's Free Clinics

“The position of the polyclinic
itself as the headquarters of the
psychoanalytic movement”
1920
ON FEBRUARY 24, 1920, Freud dispatched his daughter Mathilde and
her husband Robert Hollitscher, the Viennese businessman, to attend the
opening ceremonies for the new Berlin Poliklinik für Psychoanalytische
Behandlung Nervöser Krankheiten, the first psychoanalytic outpatient
center specifically designated as a free clinic. The clinic’s opening was
“the most gratifying thing at this time” Freud wrote to Ferenczi, and
Mathilde’s presence alongside other prominent members of the psychoanalytic
community added a measure of authority to the festivities. 1 The
Poliklinik, as it came to be known, was the brainchild of Max Eitingon
and Ernst Simmel. Their Hungarian friend and benefactor Anton von
Freund had died just a month earlier on January 20, leaving the IPA some
money but a much larger legacy of unfinished good works and his project
for a free clinic in Budapest postponed. “In Berlin there is much better
news [than] in Budapest,” Ernest Jones commented to his Dutch colleague
Jan van Emden. “They have money for the Policlinic.” 2 And
indeed Max Eitingon, moneyed and generous, took over where von Freund
left off and financed the new clinic’s start-up, now relocated to
Berlin, from his private fortune. Eitingon would continue to underwrite
the expenses of housing the ever growing Berlin Poliklinik, first at 29
Potsdamerstrasse until 1928 and then on Wichtmanstrasse until its involuntary
end in 1933.
Part classical music, part poetry reading, and part ode to psychoanalytic
inquiry, the Poliklinik’s February 14 inaugural ceremony proved to