Report of the Berlin Psycho-Analytical Policlinic1

Many of you will doubtless remember that at the foundation of our Institute we referred to the inspiration we received from a lecture delivered by Professor Freud to the Congress at Budapest on 'The Paths of Psycho-Analytic Therapy'. He warned us then to be ready for the moment when the public conscience would awake and the State would regard it as a pressing duty to make provision for the mental well-being of its citizens, no less than for the preservation of their lives and the promotion of their health. Public centres and Institutes would then be founded, the business of which would be to make psycho-analytic treatment accessible to wide circles of people. When these words of Freud were spoken—half as prophecy and half as challenge—we still had in our midst a man whose memory will always live amongst us, a man who, boldly planning, strove to bring all these hopes for the future nearer to realization, and it is not merely the respect due to a late colleague which leads me to recall the name of Dr. Anton v. Freund, now that I am about to describe the road we have travelled since the foundation of this Policlinic.

To make psycho-analysis accessible to a wider circle was from the beginning our wish, as it is of so many amongst us to-day; and when the war came to an end at the close of 1918 and we returned to our respective places of work, we felt this need to be constantly more urgent and more imperative. The extent of neurotic distress had vastly increased, and at the same time there was an increase in public demand for psycho-analytic treatment and also some sort of growing confidence in us. In the first years of the war, it seemed that psycho-analysis must be swallowed up, like so much else that had vastly increased, and at the same time there was an increase in through the war, psycho-analysis gained ground enormously. The war-neuroses demonstrated the Freudian mechanisms in the plainest manner even to the blindest and most bigoted, and