17/01/2026
Fascinating interview revealing that all of the most brilliant and intellectually exciting early psychoanalysts - Freud, Erik Erikson, Erich Fromm, Anna Freud, Wilhelm Reich, Helene Deutsch - were involved in developing new kinds of accessible, community-based, urban mental health services:
" 'Freud’s Free Clinics', by Elizabeth Ann Danto, tells the surprising story of how Erik Erikson, Wilhelm Reich, Erich Fromm, Helene Deutsch, and other psychoanalysts created a network of free outpatient clinics and pioneered important innovations in psychoanalytic treatment and method.
In emphasizing the ways in which psychoanalysts implemented their social activism and their commitment to treating the poor and working classes, Danto provides a new perspective on Freud’s legacy.
Q: Why do many people view Sigmund Freud as an elitist whose psychoanalytic treatment was reserved for the intellectually and financially advantaged?
ED: Everyday knowledge tends to make one think that the psychoanalysts reserved their treatment for the rich and that mental health treatment demanded the luxury of time. 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.”
To read the full interview, click here: https://cup.columbia.edu/author-interviews/danto-freud-free-clinics/
