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This is a thoroughly amiable inquiry into a little-known aspect of the history of psychoanalysis, those free clinical facilities that were associated with the original European psychoanalytic organizations. Elizabeth Danto, its author, teaches at the Hunter College School of Social Work, and has an admirable set of progressive political convictions.
With the microscope of left-wing politics in hand, Danto does a superb job of recounting all the details connected with this relatively unknown story. Following a suggestion by Freud in 1918, the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, supported by Max Eitingon's money, succeeded in establishing the most extensively well-endowed set of facilities. But in Vienna, London, and Budapest, psychoanalysts followed suit. These free psychoanalytic treatment centers eventually came to exist in some ten cities and seven countries.
It seems to me that one of the most admirably broad-minded things about Danto's book is that she includes Alfred Adler's Viennese clinics as part of the tale of these humanitarian efforts within psychoanalysis. She even refers to “the psychoanalyst Alfred Adler” (p. 24), as if he had never been expelled by Freud. Within Vienna, Adler's child guidance clinics were supported by the Social Democratic government, a fact that made Adler more famous there than Freud himself.
It remains unknown exactly how Freudians adapted traditional psychoanalytic technique in order to reach patients from the lower classes, but doubtless changes had to be made (if not publicly acknowledged) in how analysts approached this new set of clients. Hundreds of patients could be regularly involved. Danto tells us, for example, that “teenagers, who often went to the clinic [in Vienna] in pairs for advice on sex or work options, formed a willing audience for evening consultations with Wilhelm Reich, then deeply involved in questions of