Classical Psychoanalysis, Politics and Social Engagement in the Era Between the Wars: Reflections on the Free Clinics: Freud's Free Clinics: Psychoanalysis and Social Justice, 1918–1938 by Elizabeth Ann Danto

Abstract

This is a timely book, re-opening the debate around the political core and the degree of social commitment to be found in classical psychoanalysis, particularly as it emerged in Vienna, Berlin and Budapest in the period between the two world wars. Danto’s thesis is both stimulating and inspiring. Self-reflective disciplines such as psychoanalysis ought to be aware of their own history. Danto builds her history with a superb use of archival material, personal interviews, interview transcripts, as well as a fine ability to analyse texts. Her narrative is important and not previously known; she weaves her ensemble of stories and character portraits by always returning to focus on the theme of the free clinics. She contextualizes her material, recording shifts and changes over time and place. A problem with her strategy of dividing her chapters into linear descriptions of what happened year by year is that a more thematic approach would have permitted a more sustained story line and critical appraisal. Unlike many other historians of psychoanalysis, she avoids gossip, eschews a prurient interest in her cast of characters, and seems uninterested in idealizing or pathologizing the various personalities that appear in her narrative. She neither avoids charged issues, nor backs off from controversial critical analysis. The history of psychoanalysis is incredibly exciting, if practised by an imaginative and audacious historian, one directed to preserving memory but, more significantly, committed to reviving the idealism and vitality of these pioneering generations. Through Danto we encounter some amazing figures who made this history, figures such as Max Eitingon, Ernst Simmel,