“These were traumatic times and we talked little about them later”
A NEW daycare center was Edith Jackson’s answer to several problems. First, Jackson knew that Anna Freud craved a true research environment in which to test out her theories on early childhood development, and a clinical setting in which to conduct long-term observations of one and two year olds would suit this ideally. As the Nazis closed in more and more oppressively on the Freuds, and with her father still refusing to leave the homeland, Anna’s need for new work was palpable. Second, Jackson was immensely grateful to Freud for her own analysis and wanted to repay him with a gesture beyond the standard fee. From the meetings of the Kinderseminar she had attended at the Ambulatorium, she knew that Freud still supported the idea of free clinics. Even with expanded facilities at 7 Berggasse, the analysts’ clinic had become seriously overcrowded. And, third, with the Social Democrats out of office and Red Vienna’s welfare infrastructure scrapped, the few resources still granted to poor people had now been taken away. And so, to paraphrase Alfred Adler in 1919, why not start a new clinic?
Edith Jackson decided that her no-fee day care center (Krippe) for very small children from Vienna’s poorest families would open shortly. Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham tracked down a suitable working space for a community-based nursery school or pre-kindergarten. They located a Montessori kindergarten in Vienna’s first district, just then short on money and looking to rent out a few of its rooms. The little school, about half of which now went to the analysts, was built on the pleasant sunny side of Rudolfsplatz. Anna threw herself into designing the research protocols and redecorating at the same time and lent her Austrian countryside look to everything from the child-sized painted chairs to little tablecloths. Edith Jackson agreed to pay for the rent and rebuilding the furniture as well as for the government licensing fees, the upkeep, and the new furniture and toys. This frenetic activity, born as much by the desire to help others as to deny impinging fascism, permitted the doors to the renovated “Jackson Krippe” to open several weeks later. Like the Heitzing School, Rudolfsplatz was an intimate, all-day program that joined education to pediatric and psychiatric care. And like the crowd in the first days of the Poliklinik, at least twenty young mothers living in the second district, in families described by Dorothy as “beyond the dole,” brought their children to the new daycare center.
At the Krippe the toddlers were fed, bathed, freshly clothed, and entertained. They had free medical and dental exams and were generally well attended during the parents’ workday.1 Most of the children were from one to six years old, and the scope of their parents’ work, from laundry maids to street beggars, was wide-ranging and underpaid. Edith Jackson asked Josephine Stross, a lively analytically trained pediatrician, to work there; she was assisted by Julia Deming (another American) and a few local volunteers who oversaw meals, naps, and playtime. The child analysts observed and treated onsite most mental health disorders they saw in the school-aged children. Meanwhile, Anna and Dorothy set up the centerpiece of the program, a threefold research agenda to collect data on the eating, sleeping, and toilet training habits of the toddlers. In the years since the Heitzing School had closed, evidence of children’s vulnerability in the face of danger or abandonment during their formative years had mounted. At the same time, Anna and Dorothy were increasingly persuaded of a personal mission, to alleviate childhood suffering through psychoanalysis. Child analysis, however, required a new kind of in-depth knowledge of human growth and development. Anna and Dorothy were able to see at close hand how Stross’s team was trying to guide the children, and they laid out a timeline for their own experiments as soon as Edith Jackson agreed to fund their research. First they explored their concept of children’s innate self-regulation by watching how toddlers fed themselves. They set up individual “baby buffets” (figure 39) on child-sized tables and watched the children crawl around and select food without adult interference. How the children ate! Many years later the Viennese psychoanalyst Eva Laible laughed fondly about the buffet and Josephine Stross’s stories. “The children had never seen many of the foods on the buffet. First they ate everything for three days. Then they turned back to bread and butter.”2 At first, of course, the toddlers all gorged on chocolate, but the children started feeding themselves a balanced diet surprisingly fast. Had the children and their families not actually benefited from this study—which they did—it might suggest charitable condescension. Instead, the project succeeded in several ways. With the municipal welfare system virtually gone in 1937, the Krippe stretched Red Vienna’s vanquished model of direct assistance for one more year and, with the help of Edith Jackson and Betty Grünspan, offset the Ambulatorium’s curtailed capacity to treat children.3 In 1938, once Anna and Dorothy had moved to London under pressure, the Krippe’s basic plan provided them with an effective blueprint for developing the celebrated Hamsptead War Nurseries. Though the meticulous clinical notes vanished in the Anschluss, the Rudolfsplatz project promised a humane formula for analyzing child development. By observing how toddlers of very poor families determine their personal needs for sleep and food independently, the analysts began to formulate the concepts of “child time” and resilience that pervade today’s child welfare services. The Krippe stayed open until Anna Freud’s very last days in Vienna and was soon reconstructed in London complete with the original baby furniture4.
39 The “Baby Buffet” at the Jackson Nursery, Vienna 1937 (Photo by Willi Hoffer; Freud Museum, London)
Meanwhile, in Germany the director of the German Medical Society for Psychotherapy had opened talks with Carl Jung as part of an ambitious plan to develop a form of psychotherapy blended with a mystical belief in the curative power of the fascist nation. Jung despised not only Freud himself but everything his work stood for. From the start, Jung had advised the Göring Institute in Berlin to offer two psychotherapy tracks simultaneously. One was an aryanized, or non-Jewish, non-Freudian, version of classical psychoanalysis with an added element of spirituality. The other favored traditional medical psychiatry augmented by an increasingly ruthless biological program of sterilization and euthanasia for a broadly defined group of “incurably insane.” The Reich’s Department of the Interior had authorized Göring to set up the institute as a practice arena for Jungian, Adlerian, and independent psychotherapists, provided he closed down the “Jewish” psychoanalytic institute. In sifting through the patient demographics maintained by the Göring administration, neither track is clear. In 1937 Boehm and Göring evaluated 259 patients for treatment, rejected 110 as unsuitable, handed 43 to private practitioners, and continued 58 at the clinic.5 The Göring Institute and its branches now engaged 128 members including 60 doctors (10 of them female), plus 25 members with university degrees and 43 (including 39 females) without.6 The institute was generally short of funds and relied on its teachers and administrators to work without pay. The Wichmanstrasse facilities were so expensive to maintain that even the Berlin Jungians, as Göring wrote to Carl, were reluctant to join.7 Nevertheless, the institute also staffed subsidiary branches in Düsseldorf, Munich, Stuttgart, and Wuppertal. The Munich affiliate (near Dachau) was particularly active. Its director Leonhard Seif, who had founded the first local individual psychology group outside of Vienna in 1920 and hosted the First International Congress of Individual Psychology in 1922, coined the term psychagogy to describe his work preventing child and family neurosis. His efforts apparently required collaboration with the Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls. Seif’s work in Munich made very clear the dissonance between Adler and Freud’s ideas of community. In Freud’s view, human beings are embedded in the community but do not lose their individual selves and, in fact, keep up a constant unconscious struggle between the two. In Adler’s view the relationship between person and community is paramount, with community gaining the upper hand. Aside from Freud and Adler, the idea of “community” rule can, but need not, be confused with totalitarianism and is subject to swings in ideological interpretation. Red Vienna, for example, attempted to provide its citizens with centralized “cradle to grave” services, including mental health, infused with the idea of community yet all the while reinforcing individual autonomy. In contrast, the Third Reich’s partiality to total “care and control” (including professional psychotherapy at the Göring Institute) of the German Volk was fascistic because it deliberately eliminated individual volition. The success of mental health experts associated with the Göring Institute reflected not only the collusion with state racism among large numbers of German mental health professionals. But also, and in the same manner, this racism unified psychotherapists in their own aspirations to professionalize their discipline under Nazi rule.8 “These were traumatic times,” Martin Grotjahn recalled, “and we talked little about them later.”9