Freud's Free Clinics by Danto Elizabeth Ann;

Author:Danto, Elizabeth Ann;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PSY000000, Psychology/General, HIS010000, History/Europe/General
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2005-04-26T04:00:00+00:00

24 The London Clinic for Psychoanalysis on Gloucester Place (Photo by Claudine Rausch)

Later in November, in the last year of her quest for a permanent home for herself and her ideas, Melanie Klein arrived in London. Her relocation from Berlin could not have been better timed. The London clinic was just starting up and Klein was ideally prepared to contribute to its success. In some ways her decision to accept Jones’s invitation to join the British society was tinged with regret, and she added a little goading as well. “Simmel is said to have made a positive pronouncement on my work and its prospects for the future,” she wrote in her acceptance letter, “and to have expressed the hope that I will return with new stimuli from London to Berlin.”6 Instead she took to the London atmosphere well and stayed there, as always controversial, until the end of her life. After more than six years of strife surrounding her analysis of children in Berlin, Klein could now clarify her “ideas connected with education” and base them on “notes from the analysis of a child aged five years” with far less fear of her colleague’s ill will.7. Melanie Klein was a diligent note keeper and attentive to the minutest details of her small patients’ words and drawings. Her London work with “Alan,” “Julia,” “George,” and “Richard” formed the core of A Narrative of Child Analysis. Like her democratic colleagues in Berlin and Vienna, Klein treated at least one patient at no charge daily or performed an equivalent service to the clinic. She kept notes of these appointments in tiny jewel-like pocket diaries, the identical size every year from 1923 until 1946, with maroon leather covers so worn they seem black, indistinguishable from each other except for the year stamped in gold. Many of her patients were children for whose play therapy she ordered painted wooden toys from a special supplier in Germany. The children’s fees were noted, in Klein’s own abbreviated German mixed at times with a touch of Hungarian, with particular reference to the accounts she maintained (until 1926) for the Poliklinik. “I am obligated to the Polik. for 26 marks, 6 k. for September,” she scrawled on October 31, 1924.8 She wrote in black ink with a classic fountain pen, but her penmanship was erratic and often sloppy. Some days she tracked her accounts in hours of service due to the clinic. “For the week [of May] 24–31,” she noted on June 3, “I am responsible for 14 hours, 20” (figure 25). The same system of clinic duty applied now that Klein was in London. She also recognized that, as at her other clinics, candidates who could not afford to pay for their didactic analysis were seen as “clinic patients” by training faculty in lieu of the now customary outpatient responsibility. All told, the clinic staff treated about twenty-five patients daily. As at the other clinics, men and women of all ages and occupations lined up for the initial consultations.

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