Freud's Free Clinics

1920
be a splendid event. The daylong Programme of festivities showcased performances
by members and friends of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Society,
and included a Beethoven piano sonata, some Chopin, piano and voice
pieces by Schubert and Schoenberg, and art songs by Hugo Wolf. Ernst Simmel
read “Presentiment” and “Madness” from Rilke’s Book of Hours. Abraham
ended the day with paper on “The Rise of the Poliklinik from the Unconscious.”
The program’s overall symbolist themes of human emotion,
reality, and nature were reflected in the combination of traditional pieces
from the mainstream of German culture with contemporary work suggesting
modernity and subjectivity. For music Schubert and Chopin were mixed
with Schoenberg, Vienna’s avant-garde composer, identified musically with
the Expressionists and politically with the Social Democrats. In poetry the
psychoanalysts offset Rilke’s romantic voice with the biting surrealism of
Christian Morgenstern’s satire. Rilke was still living in Europe then, enormously
popular though still edgy, and, like Freud, an intimate of the Russian
intellectual Lou Andreas-Salomé. By the time the day was over, the analysts
could revel in a stylish celebration utterly consonant with the cultural
overtones of Weimar.
In keeping with his modernist aspirations for the Poliklinik, Eitingon invited
Freud’s son Ernst Ludwig (figure 7), the architect and engineer who
had trained in Vienna under Adolf Loos, to plan the clinic’s physical layout
and furnishings. Within a month Ernst had “won lasting recognition for
himself in his designing of the polyclinic, which is admired by everyone,”
Abraham wrote to Freud in March. 3 Ernst had just arrived in Berlin at the
invitation of his close friend Richard Neutra, his classmate in Loos’s Vienna
Bauschule architecture studio in 1912 and 1913. 4 From 1919 until his
forced emigration to London in 1933, Ernst’s years as a Berlin architect were
filled with experimentation along the lines of the New Objectivity and the
International Style of the 1920s. The commission to design the Poliklinik’s
interior space and to refurbish its musty quarters held particular appeal. “I
love the conditions stipulated by an existing building of character, “ Ernst
said years later, “and very often old [ones] have great possibilities in their
rooms.” 5 This particular suite of rooms at 29 Potsdamerstrasse had been selected
and rented as the clinic’s site because of its ideal central location and
easy proximity to the Berlin analysts’ own private offices. On the fourth
floor of a fairly modest residential building midway up a tree-lined street,
the apartment’s five interconnecting rooms were rearranged for treatment
or consultation. Light-colored wood double doors soundproofed the consulting
or therapy. An unadorned cane couch, a chair and a table, some
53