The Berlin Psychoanalytic Policlinic*

On the whole the medical profession in the United States has been more sympathetically receptive to psychoanalysis than elsewhere in the world and notably less hostile than in Austria, the land of its origin. This need not be attributed to the absence of critical examination of psychoanalytic theories on the part of American psychiatrists and internists but to the tendency to elasticity and adaptability generally more prevalent in American institutions than in European, and at the incipiency of the movement to the great American urge for novelty. In America we are apt to rush headlong into each new proposition, overdo it and if displeased, to turn calmly around and rush right out again. Such, however, has not happened in the case of psychoanalysis, which has not only retained most of its early adherents, who became interested in the subject prior to Freud's visit to America in 1909 or immediately thereafter, but which has shown a steady if diversified growth in the number of physicians who utilize it as the therapeutic method of first choice in selected cases of psycho—neurosis.

With the unusual amount of publicity given to the theory in lay journals, and the goodly number of able psychiatrists and neurologists convinced of its efficacy, it comes as a surprise, and perhaps as a rebuke, to learn that the first psychoanalytic polyclinic in the world was established, six years ago, not in the opulent United States, but in impoverished Germany, just emerging from the defeat in the Great War. From a very humble start there has developed in Berlin during this time an unpretentious though essentially substantial and effective institution.

The material equipment of a psychoanalytic clinic makes slight demands—a suite of sound—proof rooms, which may be furnished only with a simple cane couch, a chair and table, and such in effect is the furnishing of each of the four rooms occupied by the Berlin Clinic, which is located on the fourth floor of an unassuming apartment