The Vienna Psychoanalytic Polyclinic (‘Ambulatorium’): Wilhelm Reich and the Technical Seminar

Abstract

The beginnings of the Vienna Psychoanalytical Outpatient Clinic were paralleled by a revival of the psychoanalytical movement and the institutionalization of psychoanalysis, that had been interrupted by World War I. In this period of renovation, the institution founded in 1922 was – as a social experiment of the psychoanalysts of the ‘Red Vienna’ – the first clinic that made psychotherapeutic help accessible to a wider population. At the same time it contributed to establishing psychoanalysis as a method of treatment. Within the psychoanalytical society, the Clinic acted as a forum for training and clinical discussion. The concepts of transference and resistance had been discovered and theoretically substantiated. But the technical application still caused considerable problems. In this situation Wilhelm Reich initiated a technical seminar within the Clinic, from which a whole generation of analysts benefited greatly as regards the understanding of psychoanalytical processes and the analysis of transference. From a starting point of focusing on the unconscious meaning of neurotic symptoms, the organization of the entire personality with its complex defence dynamics in character-neuroses and the awareness of the negative transference, in particular, gradually became the centre of attention. After World War II a long time passed until the Clinic was reopened in 1999. Although conditions had, of course, changed, the motives were still similar: the necessity to create a clinical institution that represents psychoanalysis in the public in a competent way, the need for an adequate institutional framework to meet the challenges of the analyses of borderline cases and, last but not least, the need to deepen our knowledge and experience.