A TURNING POINT for Wilhelm Reich, as for Austria’s political left, came on January 30, 1927, when a right-wing terrorist randomly shot into a crowd of Social Democrats in Schattendorf, a small town near the Hungarian border. What particularly enraged the workers and liberals was that the accused perpetrators were swiftly acquitted on July 14. Like Germany’s paramilitary factions, Austria’s conservative Christian Socials were affiliated with autonomous militaristic groups. Austrian reactionary forces had organized their own independent paramilitary factions, the protofascist Heimwehr (Homeland Guards), for just such occasions. The conservative Christian Social party had been defeated once again in Vienna and, though they held on to national leadership, they lost the city and its cosmopolitan culture—as important to Austrians as political power—to the Social Democrats. In fact Vienna remained allied to the Social Democrats until the end of the 1920s. But the end of the decade was marked by an intensifying struggle between the two profoundly different political parties, the urban, secular liberals of Red Vienna and Austria’s ruling party whose rural Catholic constituency was still devoted to the monarchy. Even within the Vienna judiciary, though, conservative judges meted out lighter jail sentences to right-wing violence mongers, a policy that bred increasing tension between workers and party officials.
“Down with all politics!” commanded Reich, “let’s get to the practical demands of life!” Protests erupted in Vienna the next day in response to the release of the Heimwehr soldiers. The spectacular demonstration moving swiftly down the street in front of his office interrupted Reich’s morning analytic session and, together, he and his patient called it to an end. Workers had struck and occupied the inner city while the police readied their weapons. At daybreak police had launched an armed assault on the workers and Reich witnessed the massacre and the famous fire when the Palace of Justice burned down. “On that day” the image of the crowd and the police shooting at workers showed Reich “clearly that the socially suppressed individual is entirely different psychologically from the way rigid sociology of class antagonism describes him or would like him to be…. I saw, in short, that the real life of the working masses is lived on a completely different level from that on which the tumult of politicians and party politics rages.”1 The demonstrations were necessary and yet sadly futile. If rallies turned violent at every provocation, then the workers’ movement would be nothing more than a collection of dissatisfied, disorganized poor people, incessantly shifting between causes. People had to be reached on a truly personal level to avoid reconstructing artificial class barriers between party organizers and demonstrators. Parallel to deep analysis that frees the individual from internal oppression and opens up the natural flow of energy, a fully deployed campaign from the left would deliver the common people from external oppression and release a natural social harmony. Like his colleagues of the period, Reich intended to do both at once, wielding psychoanalysis for the internal and social democracy for the external. Between its earliest planning stages in 1927 and its demise in 1934, Sex-Pol implemented psychological services and bridged Reich’s theoretical link between human sexuality and organized political activities. He called this theory “sex-economy,” meaning that human behavior and society would be naturally healthy and self regulating if people could be freed of cultural repression. As has been noted earlier, sex-economic practice, meaning counseling, outreach and reform, was referred to as social work. On that day in February, however, the conciliatory ways of social democracy had proved inadequate, and Reich joined the medical group of the Arbeiterhilfe, an affiliate of the Austrian Communist Party.
In 1917, a year before hearing Freud’s speech on the advancement of free clinics, Ernst Simmel had already requested government approval for a psychoanalytic research institution including a sanatorium and a free clinic. Inpatient psychoanalytic treatment, he believed, should extend to people unable, for multiple reasons, to attend the outpatient clinic in the city. For Simmel, director of a World War I field hospital for war neuroses from 1916 to 1920, Freud’s 1918 Budapest speech only confirmed the idea that inpatient care too belonged within the social obligations of psychoanalysis. His goal for a psychoanalytic sanatorium thus predated the Berlin Poliklinik. Actually all of Simmel’s combined clinical and political ideas were bound up in the sanatorium project. For eight years now he had been raising funds to expand on the Poliklinik experience, and finally, in April 1927, sufficient financial backing came through to underwrite its inpatient counterpart. The German minister of health and education promised to send beds and to deploy state physicians there for training. It was an article of faith at the Poliklinik, and among members of the Socialist physicians circle, that the sanatorium would be as great a success as the clinic. While it never did attain prosperity, Ernst Simmel’s Schloss Tegel Sanatorium survived for about five years as a nucleus of original clinical initiatives. The sanatorium also served Freud personally as an uncommonly peaceful retreat in a small renovated castle on the edge of Berlin.
In some respects the Schloss Tegel Sanatorium recalled the leafy suburban life of prewar Austria (figure 27). “It is half an hour by car from the city center, but beautiful and quiet, situated in a park a few minutes from Lake Tegel,” Freud told Ernest Jones.2 On April 1 Freud congratulated Simmel on Tegel’s opening. “I wish you now what you need above all,” he wrote, “a little luck.”3 The Tegel Sanatorium opened officially on April 11 for the residential treatment of profoundly troubled indigent people. The architect Ernst Freud, who welcomed the commission to design and refurbish the interior of the hundred-year-old health facility, lent the project his organizational skills as well. “He not only provided us with adequate housing,” Simmel wrote to Freud, “but also helped me very much with advice in business matters. Whenever a danger threatened the development of the whole enterprise, he repeatedly gave us practical help.”4 Ernst converted the two-story building, previously used as a sanatorium as well, from its fifty large and small rooms accommodating seventy-four patients to a more functional streamlined setting for twenty-five to thirty patients. Faced with a dark old-fashioned Victorian edifice, Ernst decided that a large new double-arched entrance with plants and wicker chairs would open up the space and please patients and staff. Since his work was meant to promote a therapeutic environment, several large rooms were stripped of their ornamentation and converted into communal bathing and eating facilities reminiscent of the Viennese Gemeindebauten buildings overseen by his former mentor, Adolf Loos. Bauhaus-style white overhead lamps were hung from the ceiling to distribute light evenly over the patient and staff dining tables (the two groups shared communal meals). Hallways were cleared so that the rooms would open directly onto them, and a large area toward the back was fitted with an unusual round bathtub for hydrotherapy. The furniture was simple and bold, characteristic of Ernst’s designs, with deep-seated upholstered armchairs, round tables, and the ubiquitous wood bookcases.
27 Entrance to Schloss Tegel Park, Berlin (Author)
For venturesome psychoanalysts, the appeal of Tegel lay in its new variety of patients and their often turbulent behavior. As problems arose, the two chief physicians, Drs. Nussbrecher and Ludwig Jekels—both from Vienna—supervised the staff of analytically trained medical assistants and nurses. The clinical staff was stellar: Moishe Wulff, Edith Wiegert-Vowinckel, Irene Haenel-Guttman, Rudolf Bilz, Karl Maria Herald, Helmut Kaiser, Alfred Gross, Frances Deri, and Ludwig Fries, with Anna Freud’s friend Eva Rosenfeld as facility manager. Many were staunch Social Democrats and several, in particular Frances Deri and Edith Wiegert, would later join Otto Fenichel on an ambitious project to infuse psychoanalytic practice with Marxist theory. Others, those politically closest to Simmel, were good-naturedly anticipating a time when they could start treating patients from a serious Marxist perspective, which they envisioned as a combination of personal insight-oriented analysis and community organizing. At its height Tegel supported a ratio of eight patients to one analyst. Only patients with intransigent organicity were sent back to the psychiatric units of Berlin’s larger hospitals. Fortunately the owner of a small private psychiatric asylum located just a few minutes from Schloss Tegel agreed to house psychotic patients (at first only female) until the new sanatorium could accommodate them. They would be treated psychoanalytically by Simmel or his staff. The mentally ill population intended for Schloss Tegel were mostly referred by the Berlin clinicians and suffered from addictions and severe character problems or personality disorders. Otherwise they all too easily landed in prisons or asylums, victims of odd hunger cures or electroshock, death by suicide, or hopeless wandering from one physician to another.
The first patient was a small, acutely anxious woman who found illness, surgery, death, burial, and mourning so taboo she was ceaselessly compelled to perform ceremonial washing. At Freud’s urging, her husband escorted her to the sanatorium because her obsessionalism went beyond the scope of ambulatory, unintensive outpatient treatment. Another sad woman was incapacitated by deformed elephantiasized legs: she had not stood straight for the last two years because, for her, all horizontal furniture was taboo and persecuted her (literally and metaphorically) to stay awake and wash herself, enduring night after night of torment. Not only did the patients suffer horrendously, but so did their families out of fear of phobic infection, grief, or sheer ruin from a spouse’s kleptomania or a father’s tragic gambling. Drawing on family therapy concepts later elaborated by Salvador Minuchin and Nathan Ackerman, Simmel realized that some family members felt constrained to heed the designated patient’s every symptom at home, perhaps engaging with an anorexic daughter’s endless preoccupation with food intake. In this case the suffering daughter was merely depicting the family system’s collective neurosis. Therefore, Simmel posited, removing the symptomatic person from their brothers and sisters or parents, or their spouse, alarming as it may seem, allowed the patient some freedom to recover on their own. Didn’t the new therapeutic community simply replicate the various symptoms of anxiety, depression, and obsessive ceremonials? Or impose on already fragile people “hypochondriacs philosophizing at table about the quality of their nasal mucous and persons in depression daily proclaiming in audible tones their wish to die?”5 Critics would argue that such a protected environment was actually harmful to recovery because it promoted dependence and, therefore, inherently deprived patients of the opportunity to confront reality. “But one cannot take from a man what he himself voluntarily resigned: life in the real present,” Simmel told the faultfinders. And since the patient’s disturbed psychic existence is only a pseudo-reality, offering them a new reality is hardly a deprivation. The new reality is pleasantly neutral, with “physicians ready to help, kindly attendants, male and female, good food, artistic rooms and beautiful country surroundings.”6 For a while the freedom from financial worry is liberating for doctor and patient alike because, in a free clinic, neither can barter health for money. Treatment starts slowly, perhaps during walks in the park with the analyst, until the whole world of clinic, staff, and patients becomes a re-created phantom family, grist for the analytic mill, and ultimately a far-reaching authenticity.
Tegel could hardly afford to let a patient collapse completely, and the staff did take measures to prevent it. The physicians, nurses, and house personnel met early every morning to discuss cases around an oak table in the consulting room. The analysts reviewed what had transpired during patient sessions and Mrs. Bruenitzer, the housemother at the sanatorium, shared her observations of any new behaviors, noticed night or day. How to prevent a love affair, a suicide, a pseudo-cure, a rather amazing nonalcoholic intoxication in a recovering dipsomaniac? Faced with this last extraordinary patient’s insatiable morbid cravings during detoxification, Simmel assented to double and treble portions of food and withheld scolding when the patient cut off tree branches and then smashed a coffee set. A special nurse was assigned to him alone and analytic sessions at the least sign of violence or anxiety resulting from withdrawal, day or night. Having thus recreated a total milieu of the mother-child intimacy of feeding, “the infantile phase spontaneously disappeared” and treatment progressed.7 On the whole, however, Simmel demanded that patients conform to standards of civility accepted outside the facility, that they return to family or work in increments as treatment progressed, and that they become conscious contributors to their unusual Weimarian community.
The Schloss Tegel Sanatorium was eight years in the making, and it lasted barely five. Simmel’s efforts to achieve an integrated healing community of patients and psychoanalysts never really abated. He developed some extraordinarily bold theories at Schloss Tegel, among them family therapy and the idea of complementary neurosis (codependency). He reintroduced therapeutic ideas like short-term psychoanalytic treatment from his earlier career directing a field hospital for shell-shocked soldiers. Simmel’s technique combined, he said, “analytic-cathartic hypnosis with analytical discussion and interpretation of dreams … result[ing] in liberation from symptoms in two to three sessions.”8 But to bring his project to fruition would have required fund-raising proficiency as great as his clinical talent. Reminded of Hitschmann’s two-year lobbying effort to secure government approval for the Ambulatorium, Freud, who ultimately intervened on Simmel’s behalf as he had in the Vienna proceedings, remained encouraging. “I envy you the patience with which you are willing to go on in the struggle against those unreliable people, [the Ministry of Heath of the German government]…. The principle should always be not to make concessions to those who don’t have anything to give but who have everything to gain from us.”9
Meanwhile, in Vienna, Freud had new reasons to support innovative psychoanalytic projects. For one, his daughter Anna had embarked on a psychoanalytic undertaking of her own. A small new school, named the Heitzing School after its location in the leafy suburbs of Vienna, implemented an experiment in early childhood education designed by Anna Freud and her companion Dorothy Burlingham along with their close friend Eva Rosenfeld. Rosenfeld was a large-boned woman with brown hair piled high, long arms, and wide swinging gestures that could sweep a fallen child off the ground or a truckload of turnips into the car. Originally a Berlin relative of the Freuds’, Eva had moved to Vienna fifteen years earlier to marry and was now in the painful position of surviving the loss of three of her four children. When her eldest daughter Mädi died a sudden accidental death in 1924, Eva began to consider designing a memorial that was more socially useful and more powerful than a typical shrine. Her life was full of psychoanalysis and teaching, and the Freuds were her great friends. With Mädi’s death still painfully fresh, Eva drew on her own earlier teaching experience at Zellerhaus, a Berlin girls’ orphanage, and set out to memorialize her child by building a progressive school. “The young women pupils for whom my house would provide a sort of research station” on their way to becoming the New Woman, said Eva, would live and learn “a model of household and gardening management.”10 But Eva also thought that the psychoanalytic component was essential to growth and development and brought Anna Freud, to whom she had been introduced by their mutual friend, the psychoanalyst Siegfried Bernfeld, into her foster home-based school. In 1925 Dorothy Burlingham joined the circle permanently.
When Erik Erikson, then a young German artist named Erik Homburger, arrived in Vienna that spring at the invitation of his friend Peter Blos to work at a new kindergarten, Anna Freud and the larger Freud circle took him in and “opened a life’s work.”11 In the years he spent at Heitzing, until the school closed in 1932, Erikson and Blos and their colleagues were afforded months of trial and error to learn what actually educated children and what simply appealed to their sense of the game. Erik was willing to put children and adults on an equal plane (a reciprocity Anna Freud found too lenient) and to use a Dewey-like curriculum where education was based on classwide community projects. The children who thrived on the independence and self-sufficiency of the projects were those who, in Erikson’s famous future work, already had a better sense of personal identity. It was relatively easy to have a progressive educational mission in a pleasant middle class district like Heitzing near a park, an ideal location for the small private school installed in the backyard of the Rosenfeld’s large suburban home on Wattmanngasse. Technically, the Heitzing project was a communal private school for children and early adolescents. Some of the child residents were, however, foster children (Haustörchter) and actually wards of the state. The pupils ranged from Kyra Nijinsky, the dancer’s daughter, and Vera von Freund-Toszeghi, granddaughter of the late Hungarian psychoanalytic patron Anton von Freund, to abandoned and disturbed street children, along with Ernst Simmel’s son and Dorothy’s four children. Burlingham built, furnished, and supplied the two-story four-room schoolhouse, designed by Erikson, while Rosenfeld contributed her management skills, as well as music and daily lunch for the next five years. The little school’s curriculum was organized along selected psychoanalytic principles including dreams, symbols, and unconscious influences on human relationships. Erikson taught art, German, and humanities. Peter Blos, the school’s director, taught geography and science and Joan Serson (who would marry Erik in 1930) taught dance. Marie Briehl, the future child analyst, and Dorothy Burlingham taught English. August Aichorn appeared in the afternoon for free discussions with the children, an ad hoc form of group therapy. The protected environment, with few rules and large special projects, could be seen as either chaotic or liberating for children, but, until its end, research produced by the school informed much of the emerging field of child analysis and significantly influenced early childhood teaching.
In her 1927 papers, “Four Lectures on Child Analysis,” and in her seminars at the Vienna Society and at the local Kinderhaus for children under age six from working-class families, Anna Freud differentiated her supportive therapeutic approach from Melanie Klein’s intense focus on the infantile unconscious. Almost two-thirds of the pupils at Heitzing were in analysis with Anna as patients and study subjects (as were children of fellow analysts as well), so her clinical authority was altogether pervasive. August Aichorn had a different, at times more questionable, influence at Heitzing. As a government official he held jurisdictional authority to intervene if a child was harmed by a family member. Anna was simply a private citizen, one who held enormous moral influence but little actual control and whose vision of the larger social world, at the time, was circumscribed. She could not disturb the well-reciprocated devotion to her father and she suffered, as well, from a timidity bred from staying exclusively within the individual analytic purview—a narrowness distinctly not shared by her father. Anna and Dorothy had taken to a simpler life, a country home with vegetable patches and seasonal flowers and an Austrian style of dress with long, wide patterned skirts and pleated white blouses. In 1927 this rusticity on a Viennese woman spoke perhaps of an Austrian allegiance, an unprompted conservatism that would reappear in some aspects of her later life. Nevertheless, at Heitzing and in her public life Anna openly admired Aichorn’s therapeutic work with juvenile delinquents as well as Bernfeld’s advocacy of school reforms and encouraged the leaders of Red Vienna in their advancement of special child guidance centers. She even fed her hungry child patients during their analytic sessions. Erik Erikson tells the story of Martha Freud, seeing the maid Paula Fichtl carry a plate of food into Anna’s office, saying, “A costly affair, child analysis!”12 Many of Anna’s patients were private, but some were public foster children. Interestingly, the foster children were often the subjects of Erikson’s research on child development. Erikson, who knew little about psychology before starting at Heitzing, found that the children from poor families “opened up data beyond those provided in the analysis of children whose parents could afford to pay for treatment.” Many years after leaving Vienna he developed an ambitious metadiagram for identity and the life cycle, his famous eight stages of life that intimately interweave the psychological and social dimensions of human experience. In Erikson’s schema people’s successful resolution of epigenetic psychosocial “crises” revolves around their ability to conform to dominant Western culture by separating from the family, achieving autonomy, generating results, and gracefully aging out of society with a sense of personal accomplishment. Paradoxically, his research was conducted precisely on those individuals most alienated from the hegemonic culture.
On April 20 Sigmund Freud’s name was published, along with Alfred Adler’s, in the Arbeiter-Zeitung’s formal list of Red Vienna’s thirty-eight most prominent citizens, praising them for their social and cultural achievements.13 It was a crucial time in the ongoing expansion of the psychoanalytic movement as sibling Berlin and Vienna challenged each other regularly for dominance in clinical and theoretical innovation. “A feeling of community,” Freud cautioned his quarrelling friends with the air of an exasperated father, would “enable you to unite … in your endeavors” around the work to be done at the Tenth International Psychoanalytic Congress, which he was not able to attend.14 Berlin boasted of expanded facilities while Vienna gloried in Freud’s presence. In Stuttgart the daily newspaper, the Stuttgart Tagblatt, published a long article about psychoanalysis as the theme for the town’s “pedagogical week.” The paper announced lectures by Bernfeld and Landauer and called on the city’s educators, trainers, and doctors to “wipe out” neurosis.15 Eventually, neither Berlin nor Vienna would sustain the movement in the face of Fascist and Nazi threats. But, for the moment, at least in Vienna, the earlier partnership between analysts and Tandler’s social welfare institutions somewhat cushioned the field of child and adolescent psychoanalysis.
The renewed need for free clinics was not lost on the analysts and, as they would soon read in the most recent IPA statutes, “of special value in the promotion of [psychoanalysis is] the establishment of Institutes and Outpatient Treatment Centres, Clinics.”16 The surprise was not that the clinic reports became regular agenda items at every semi-annual IPA meeting after 1927, but that they had been judged less important before then. Hitschmann was quick to grace his first 1927 Ambulatorium report with the crucial passage from Freud’s 1918 Budapest speech, that “the poor man should have [the] right to assistance for his mind.” Hitschmann’s foremost concern was how to publicize the Ambulatorium’s urgent need for new quarters, while informing his readers of the clinic’s improved legal status, without forfeiting the sense of ongoing struggle. Hitschmann and Federn had met with Tandler in January to discuss the clinic’s pressing lack of space and to plead for government funding for new offices. At the same time, Josef Friedjung, a veteran member of the municipal council, had met with Mayor Seitz and sent compelling petitions to city officials. Over the last five years thousands of patients—mostly office workers, shopkeepers, and government officials—had found help and an indispensable sense of well-being at the Ambulatorium for the destitute, they wrote.17 The Ambulatorium was by now one of Vienna’s largest providers of mental health treatment (after Wagner-Jauregg’s outpatient clinic) and was developing new services like the child clinic as fast as it could. Continuously monitored by the Public Health Department, the Vienna analysts had voluntarily paid the rent, lighting, and heat (and donated their time) completely on their own. Meanwhile the municipal doctors, health insurance companies, marriage counselors, alcoholism stations, and food pantries sent over an increasing number of patients. Hitschmann was still on the medical staff of the General Hospital and loyal to “the great clinical community in the heart of Vienna,” as his colleague Josef Friedjung said.18 Above all else, Hitschmann said, the analysts simply sought to promote the humanitarian purposes of psychoanalysis, but the five small rooms of the Herzstation in the hospital’s shadow were severely inadequate for this mission. Nevertheless, Hitschmann’s bid was unsuccessful and the city government, as in the years 1920 through 1922, refused to grant the analysts’ requests. Instead the city was spending hundreds of thousands of dollars buying up as much real estate as it could and developing an extraordinary expanse of workers’ housing, ultimately the stately signature of Red Vienna.
“Erbaut von der Gemeinde Wien in der Jahren 19”: even today each set of buildings dating from the period of Red Vienna proudly preserves the words “Built by the Community of Vienna in the Years 19” on its facade. Grouped together and repeated on hundreds of buildings throughout the city, these bold large-scale signatures reveal a nexus of concerns from the sociopolitical discourse of the era. Effectively mottoes for the lasting impact of a fused relationship between citizen and state, the words refocus our attention on the interdependence of private life and public culture, an effect similarly conveyed by the free psychoanalytic clinics. At its core a fascinating dialectic between architecture and social science formed the basis on which social democratic city planners created for Viennese citizens an identifiable sense of place, addressed the social needs of families with children, and advanced the individual worker’s potential in a democratic state. “Great tenements, as bold in architecture as they are in economics, proclaim their origin in staring red letters,” reported an admiring release from the Commonwealth Fund.19 The second great wave of municipal housing construction began that May and result in a total of sixty-three thousand affordable new dwellings for Vienna city workers. At its peak the project would employ over two hundred architects and engineers, many of whom had studied at the school of Otto Wagner. Influenced by new housing design in Germany and the West, the latest apartments were individually more spacious than the original Gemeindebauten and organized into immense structures with hundreds of dwellings spread over several city blocks. The distinctive Mittelstandswohnungen (middle class dwellings) each measured a comfortable 613 square feet and the kitchen was separate from the dining room. The residential sites were set back from the street, built around grand semi-enclosed parks, and accessed through a monumental common entryway. These were virtually self-contained villages, and daily life in these “superblock” dwellings of up to a thousand apartments whirred around an economy all its own. Large cooperative stores, dozens of product shops and workshops (ateliers), meeting halls, a bookstore, and large automated laundry and bathing facilities supported the communal lifestyle. At the open air baths men like the skilled metal worker Karl Potenski would meet up with their families. “I went straight from the factory to the bath where I met my wife and our child,” he recalled. “The Kongressbad was open until 10 o’clock in the evening. Our child grew up on the sand of that bath. We played table tennis, we called it Ping Pong. It was our happiest time.”20 The huge internal courtyards (figure 28) buzzed with children charging toward the playing fields for after-school sports, mothers on benches, playgrounds, paths, public toilets, baby changing rooms, and milk bars. Social services and public amenities ranged from the tuberculosis clinic, perhaps several kindergartens and youth care facilities, wading pools for children and swimming pools for adults, to the worker’s health insurance office and the pharmacy. From there the social workers, sometimes dreaded and sometimes welcomed, would fan out across the buildings to visit families in their homes. In 1927 many distributed the notorious infant layettes.
When Julius Tandler wrested from the Municipal Council the authority to distribute infant layettes to all newborns, regardless of family need, he was vehemently accused of pandering to the socialist propaganda machine. The baby clothes were attractively packaged in red gift cartons. Motherhood, a mother with child sculpture by Anton Hanak, was pictured on the front, and the parcels were further ornamented with characteristic Wiener Werkstätte borders and lettering. A listing of Vienna’s thirty-four maternal-child consultation centers was printed on the inside.21 The need-blind aspect of the distribution particularly enraged the opposition, which objected to any suggestion of civic entitlement, that childbearing women were entitled to this aid simply because they were citizens of Vienna and regardless of their economic status. If anything, the Christian Socials thought, the clothes parcels should go only to needy families. Tandler countered that the free layettes were educational, sanitary, and had a “beneficial effect on the young mother’s inner state.”22 Psychoanalytic principles had touched social welfare and Tandler urged the municipal social workers (most likely trained by Aichorn), the district welfare officers, and the local health stations’ Fürsorgerinnen to deliver the packages on their rounds to family homes.
28 Interior courtyard of a Viennese community dwelling (Author)
At least thirteen thousand municipal layettes were disbursed that year alone by social workers making home visits. The social workers no doubt evaluated the physical and psychological milieu of the home as well and referred children or adolescents to the Kinderüberahmsstelle (Child Observation Center) if necessary. The mere mention of the home visitor could evoke the sense of a surprise attack, of the morality police prowling indigent neighborhoods to search out and remove children from parents whose only crime was poverty. In reality, her appearance was far more benign. Poor families could receive extra clothes and food vouchers, and the waiting list for housing could be shortened. Even more important, though, neglected children who slept in their clothes and shoes in “indescribable, filthy, really terrible” beds or a child “beaten black and blue” could be helped. So many families were helped that the number of reported incidents decreased by 8 percent in one year, from 3,324 in 1926 to 3,089 in 1927. Fortunately, numbers speak louder than rhetoric: children removed from homes because of “morals endangered” were only 2 percent of the total. But far more significant reasons for transferring children to nonfamily care included “relatives admitted to hospital” (30 percent), poverty/unemployment (14 percent), homelessness (16 percent), neglect (7 percent), and delinquency (8 percent).23 Behind the social worker making this assessment stood the power of the state’s new medical profession and the organized public health responsibility among doctors. School physicians and school dentists, tuberculosis specialists and guidance counselors fanned out across hundreds of child health stations and into community buildings and family homes. In effect, Tandler had finally succeeded in making government respond directly to the health and mental heath needs of dependent children.
In the United States of the mid-1920s the progress made by psychoanalysis was ambiguous: its popularity in official medical circles was also its undoing, Ferenczi thought, and led “to a tendency to be satisfied with a superficial acquaintance” with psychoanalysis.24 Ferenczi reported at a meeting of the British society that the recent surge of interest concerned him because the conservative American values of individualism and self-sufficiency, and the general reluctance to be personally analyzed, were at odds with psychoanalysis as the Europeans knew it. He had delivered two series of lectures at Columbia University and at the New School for Social Research. The doctors’ overwrought fear of encroachment by New York’s lay practitioners caused Ferenczi to separate his courses in two, one for the medical audience and one for others. With no thanks from Freud, Ferenczi had pursued an incredibly arduous teaching and training schedule, placating the Americans with extra seminars, and lobbying all the while for new subsidies and funds. Freud’s unsparing mockery of “Dollaria” and equally discouraging, distrustful view of the Hungarians seemed unduly harsh. A journalist had requested a speech about psychoanalysis for a documentary. “I would agree only if they gave me enough money to set up a polyclinic in Budapest,” Ferenczi wrote wearily to Freud.25 Yet in Ferenczi’s absence from Budapest Imre Hermann had convened the Hungarian society with renewed vigor. Once Ferenczi returned in October he could inform Freud that he hoped “in not too long a time [to] find a house and home of an outpatient clinic” and that the Budapest society was engrossed in administrative plans to lay the clinic’s foundation.26