Key concepts in social welfare and clinical social work-concepts such as person-in-environment, women's rights, prevention and outreach-had as precedents the pioneering theory and practice of Europe's free psychoanalytic clinics of the 1920s. Sex-Pol, a Viennese community-based clinical network created in 1927 by Wilhelm Reich, perhaps the most overtly political of the first psychoanalysts, was motivated by reformist social goals he shared with Sigmund Freud. This historical study of Sex-Pol draws on Reich's own words to explore his use of the term “social work” where clinical work is predicated on an activist ideology of human liberation.