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In September 1918, in an address at the Fifth International Psychoanalytic Congress in Budapest, Freud told his fellow psychoanalysts 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 advocated for the establishment of out-patient psychoanalytic clinics where “…treatments shall be free” (p 17).
Elizabeth Ann Danto, a professor at the Hunter College School of Social Work, CUNY, uses this moment as the starting point for her investigation into a vital 20-year period in the history of clinical psychoanalysis, the time between World Wars I and II, when free outpatient clinics were established in Berlin, Vienna, London, Frankfurt, and Budapest, and planned in several other cities. Danto argues that the free clinics were the product of the progressive politics that infused the broader psychoanalytic movement at the time, and she implies that the social activism of the psychoanalysts involved in the free clinics, including, among others, Ernst Simmel, Wilhelm Reich, Otto Fenichel, Karl Abraham, Helene Deutsch, Edith Jacobsen, Siegfried Bernfeld, Sandor Rado and Sandor Ferenczi, was set into motion by Freud's rallying cry in Budapest. According to Danto's richly detailed narrative, the free clinics grew out of a unique mission that forged a link between psychoanalytic practice and social activism and owed its existence to the social democratic politics of Freud and his followers.
Focusing attention on the Poliklinik in Weimar Berlin and the Ambulatorium in Red Vienna, Danto shows how psychoanalysts formed alliances with government; relied on the wealthy patrons, some of whom, including Max Eitigon and Anton von Freund, were analysts themselves; and perhaps most importantly, contributed pro bono services to realize what Danto characterizes as a social mission among psychoanalysts of the time. The result was not only free clinical services to the poor and working classes, but also the spre