Did the psychoanalysts believe specifically in free mental health clinics?
ED: Freud’s own circle of analysts did. In 1926 the N.Y. State Board of Charities denied the early psychoanalysts permission to open a free clinic. Since then the American medical mental health establishment has tried to use increasingly elaborate justifications for maintaining a private practice model. But building on the discovery that even simple storefront clinics helped children, adolescents, older people, and families, I show that, in the 1920s psychoanalysis gave rise to a new kind of community-based urban mental health services. Erik Erikson, Erich Fromm, Anna Freud, Wilhelm Reich – some of the most popular thinkers of the era (and still today) – made psychoanalysis accessible to students, artists, craftsmen, laborers, factory workers, office clerks, unemployed people, farmers, domestic servants, and public school teachers. Q: Did the psychoanalysts disparage women? ED: The idea that psychoanalysis is antifeminist because it was targeted to a small group of frustrated bourgeois
