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This is a recording of a talk that was originally delivered on 14 September 2020.
Psychoanalysis was still very young in 1918 when Sigmund Freud asserted people’s “right to assistance for the mind.”
To meet this social right, he said, “clinics and out-patient departments will be started… where treatment will be free.” By the end of the 1920s, psychoanalytic clinics had opened in Berlin, London, Budapest, Zagreb, Moscow, Frankfurt, Trieste and more. Upholding this mission into her years of exile and beyond, Anna Freud inserted into a range of clinical, educational and legal services this fundamental yet too often unacknowledged “right to assistance for the mind.”
Elizabeth Ann Danto is Professor Emeritus, Hunter College of the City University of New York. Dr. Danto is a writer and international lecturer on the history of psychoanalysis as a marker of urban culture. Her book Freud’s Free Clinics – Psychoanalysis & Social Justice, 1918-1938 won the Gradiva Award and the Goethe Prize.
