Freud's Free Clinics

Psychoanalysis and Social Justice, 1918-1938

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by Elizabeth Ann Danto

Columbia University Press

Due/Published May 2005, 352 pages, cloth

ISBN 0231131801

Drawing on interviews with witnesses to the early psychoanalytic movement as well as new archival material, this fascinating chronicle rescues from obscurity the proud history of a movement usually regarded as an expensive form of treatment for the economically and intellectually advantaged.
Today many people believe that Sigmund Freud was a Victorian elitist who pathologized mental health and women. This book shows Freud and the early psychoanalysts -Wilhelm Reich, Erik Erikson, Karen Horney, Erich Fromm, and Helene Deutsch, among others -to be social activists who built free clinics and tried to make mental health treatment available to all, regardless of gender, social class, age, or occupation.
Free institutions such as the Berlin Poliklinik, the Vienna Ambulatorium, Wilhelm Reichs Sex-Pol, and Alfred Adlers child-guidance clinics pioneered treatment and training methodologies still used, and still debated, today. Child analysis, short-term therapy, crisis intervention, task-centered treatment, active therapy, and clinical case presentations were all developed at these institutions. Men and women were enrolled in roughly equal numbers at the clinics where, from 1918 to 1938, daily life was shaped by other contemporary social and democratic movements, including childrens rights, workers rights, modernism, and feminism.