The Force of Ideas

Paul Bergmann, Pädagoge, Univ. can. für Lehramtsprüfung, mit Bernfeld bekannt, will nicht Analytiker werden, nur in seiner Schulpraxis anwenden; kann nicht zahlen.

The minutes of November 11th, 1926, of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society's Teaching Institute record my father's request to begin training as a psychoanalytic pedagogue. Amateurishly typed, with a ribbon in need of replacement, the terse German describes Paul Bergmann as a university student who intended to use psychoanalysis as a teacher, knew Siegfried Bernfeld, and would need a scholarship from the Society. These were the few facts that the Teaching Institute's administrative committee - Helene Deutsch, the director, along with Paul Federn, Anna Freud, Eduard Hitschmann, Hermann Nunberg, Wilhelm Reich, and Theodor Reik - thought worthy of record.

The Vienna Psychoanalytic Society had opened the Teaching Institute two years earlier for school teachers, social workers, art historians and others without medical backgrounds. Although physicians interested in psychoanalysis could receive training in the walk-in clinic of the Society, Vienna's Austrian law permitted only physicians to offer therapy in public institutions. Since Freud viewed neuroses as arising out of conflicts between the erotic desires of the developing individual and society's constraints, and believed that the humanities was a legitimate background for analytic practice, the track for lay analysts was a logical response. Indeed, Freud had vigorously counseled several prospective analysts, including Otto Rank and his youngest daughter Anna against medical training.2

The track for psychoanalytic pedagogues was less the inspiration of Freud than of Anna Freud, who had been meeting with August Aichhorn, Siegfried Bernfeld and Wilhelm Hoffer in an informal study group. While psychoanalytic theory focused on the family configuration as central to the development of individual mental life, Freud was turning his attention to larger social forces in