July 15, 2005

'Freud's Free Clinics: Psychoanalysis and Social Justice, 1918-1938'

By NINA C. AYOUB

In 1918 Sigmund Freud wowed his audience at the fifth international congress of psychoanalysts. Speaking at the Budapest gathering, he urged his disciples and colleagues to create outpatient clinics with free services for the indigent. "The poor man should have just as much right to assistance for his mind as he now has to the life-saving help offered by surgery," he argued, adding, "neuroses threaten public health no less than tuberculosis."

If that last point was debatable, the