Freud's Free Clinics

1918–1922: SOCIETY AWAKES
the institutional insult. 63 Deutsch used some of Schilder’s experiments with
humanistic hypnosis to draw out, for example, an elderly catatonic woman,
intuiting that just behind her patient’s blank façade a hidden consciousness
was listening and inviting human contact. Evidently by the early 1930s most
of the young analysts at the Ambulatorium were encouraged to study
Schilder’s model. Erik Erikson (then still using the name Erik Homburger),
who had attended some of Tandler’s classes, pursued further studies in psychiatry
with Schilder. Paul Federn maintained friendly connections to the
university clinic and later found that the application of psychologically
based therapy to psychosis was invaluable. The clinic itself was not far from
the Freud home on Berggasse, and Anna Freud attended afternoon training
sessions while Deutsch was an assistant. In Anna’s tightly controlled background
as a grade school teacher, little had prepared her for the spontaneous
outbursts and unmitigated pain of the psychiatric patients. But Anna
learned quickly. She watched her friend Grete Lehner Bibring, also a pupil
of Schilder’s, apply his integrated model to her very first analytic patient, a
prostitute with a compulsive neurosis. Grete had graduated from medical
school at age twenty-four and started a psychiatric practice right away. Even
after two years of experience at Wagner-Jauregg’s clinic, Grete still looked
back on Schilder’s training as the best preparation for handling the florid
psychiatric symptoms of, for example, a delusional, twenty-three-year-old
polymorphously perverse clinic patient. Nonetheless, ten years were to pass
before Schilder formally brought medical psychiatry to the Ambulatorium
with the brilliant but short-lived Department for the Treatment of Borderline
and Psychoses.
Meanwhile, on the main campus of the University of Vienna, the seminar
in sexology grew ever more popular. After Fenichel had left Vienna for
Berlin that fall, Reich assumed chairmanship and administrative responsibility
for scheduling lectures and conferences. His outspoken interest in human
sexuality was reflected in his choice of program speakers like Isidor
Sadger (Reich’s own analyst), then researching homosexuality and sexual
perversions, and Eduard Hitschmann (figure 11), who was publishing studies
on female frigidity. Reich’s experience with authoritarian structure bred
by four years in the military soon led him to divide the seminar into two
branches, a biological group headed by Eduard Bibring and a psychological
group, his own. The events were so popular, Reich reported, that thirty students
and supporters turned out for a fairly plain lecture on “Drive and Libido
Concepts from Forel to Jung”. 64 As attendance grew, Reich encountered
eager groups of radicalized university students, among them Fenichel
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