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After years of ‘Freud bashing’ it has become a common belief that psychoanalysis is an outdated clinical method that relied on the treatment of wealthy patients. Recent publications on Freud's clinical work tend to highlight this social aspect (Brody 1970; Lynn & Vaillant 1998 for negative readings, or even Lohser & Newton 1996 and Roazen 1995 for more favourable attitudes). Furthermore psychoanalysts themselves are seen as conservative practitioners without social engagement. We all know how false these ideas are but it is not always easy to prove a better point. And here comes a book based on fine research, drawing from new interview and archival material that not only challenges the attacks on analytical social positioning but gives a vivid picture of the ‘Zeitgeist’ and life in Vienna and Berlin during the revolutionary period 1918-1938.
Elizabeth Danto, Professor of Practice Sequence at the Hunter College School of Social Work at New York, teaches social welfare policy and human development. So her interests were focused more on the social implication of psychoanalytic work and less on theoretical developments. I met her in Paris when she was doing part of her research and remember her surprise when I explained the work of the Jean Favreau Centre for psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic treatment (Gougoulis 2006), unknown to English-speaking researchers. At the time she had already published her papers on the Ambulatorium of Vienna and the Berlin Poliklinik (Danto 1998, 1999).
Elizabeth Danto gives us a clear picture of Red Vienna and the consequences of some early Freudian ideas on psychic welfare. Need we be reminded that in 1918, after the disaster of World War I, Freud foresaw that ‘the conscience of society will awake and remind it that the poor man should have just as much right to assistance for his mind as he now has to the life-saving help offered by surgery; and that the neuroses threaten public health no less than tuberculosis …’ (Freud 1910). It is al