Naughty Children

Christopher Turner

• Freud’s Free Clinics: Psychoanalysis and Social Justice 1918-38 by Elizabeth Ann Danto
  Columbia, 348 pp, £19.50, May 2005, ISBN 0 231 13180 1

In 1918, Sigmund Freud gave a speech at the Fifth International Congress of Psychoanalysis in Budapest. It was two months before the Armistice, but he looked to the future rather than dwelling on civilisation’s obvious discontents: ‘The conscience of society will awake,’ he promised his audience, ‘and remind it that the poorest man should have just as much right to assistance for his mind as he now has to life-saving help offered by surgery.’ To this end, Freud, sounding more like a health reformer than a psychoanalyst, urged his followers to create ‘institutions or out-patient clinics . . . where treatment shall be free’. Keen to contribute to a better postwar world, Freud hoped that one day these charitable clinics would be state funded – ‘the neuroses,’ he insisted, ‘threaten public health no less than tuberculosis.’ Max Eitingon, the psychoanalyst who funded the first of these clinics, later wrote that Freud had spoken ‘half as prophecy and half as challenge’.