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Psychoanalysts are well aware of the tripartite structure of psychoanalytic education: personal analysis, supervision of control cases, and didactic course work. Most analysts would probably be surprised to learn, however, that at the same Budapest conference where Freud adumbrated this structure in the fall of 1918, he also made a commitment to clinics that would be under the same umbrella, if not actual roof, of the various psychoanalytic institutes. Furthermore, the clinics were to be supported financially by their respective institutes; patients would be seen on a sliding scale, ranging as low as zero. Psychoanalysis would thus become available to members of all social strata.
Freud's proclamation to start clinics did not fall on deaf ears. The number of participants who were in Budapest in late September and early October 1918 was large and reads like a “Who's Who” of early psychoanalysis. The list included Max Eitingon, Ernst Simmel, Eduard Hitschmann, and Sandor Ferenczi, Melanie Klein, Hanns Sachs, Sandor Rado, and Karl Abraham. All were instrumental in the founding of clinics, first in Berlin, then Vienna, followed by Paris, London, and Zagreb. Elizabeth Danto discovered at least twelve of these clinics. Danto's work provides us with until now a missing and important piece of scholarship. While some of the clinics fell victim to the Nazis by 1938, others, such as those in London and Paris, still function today.
This book is much more than a history of psychoanalytic clinics. It is a history of Red Vienna during the twenty-year period from 1918 to 1938 and the relationship of psychoanalysis to the larger political movement of the time. Freud maintained close relationships with socialists, including Ernst Simmel. Some of the psychoanalysts of the period, including Erich Fromm, identified themselves as Marxists. The book includes a discussion of social programs for children born out of wedlock; the architecture of the period, including the Bauhaus school; and he