The 2021 Greene Clinic Community Speaker Series Description: “In the early 1930s, a popular Viennese newspaper published the article ‘psychoanalysis for the destitute’ to report on the city’s accessible mental health programs. While requests for treatment at the psychoanalysts’ free clinic subsequently hit record numbers, the ambulatorium was actually just one of their many community-based services for poor or working-class people of all ages. Anna Freud advocated (as her father had) for an enlargement of state responsibility for mental health and, from the mid-1920s on, developed counseling centers located in the public schools and municipal housing. As this emerging research shows, the psychoanalysts of the first and second generations after Freud accomplished far more in marginalized communities than has been acknowledged to date.” Elizabeth Ann Danto is emeritus professor at Hunter College – City University of New York, and an independent curator who writes and lectures internationally on the history of psychoanalysis as a system of thought and a marker of urban culture. She is the author of Historical Research (Oxford University Press, 2008) and her book Freud’s Free Clinics – Psychoanalysis and Social Justice, 1918–1938 (Columbia University Press, 2005) received the Gradiva Book Award and the Goethe Prize.

Part 1

Part 2: