ABSTRACT
In Vienna of the 1920s, August Aichhorn was bound to become a major figure at Hietzing. First and foremost, he was a teacher. As director of two consecutive public residences for adolescents, he had set up large schools where new educational principles could be tested out and implemented. In 1929 though, with Hietzing entering its second year, Aichhorn’s friend Anna Freud said that the field of psychoanalytic pedagogy was only in its infancy. Her lecture of the same year articulated his own position well. Originally, some analysts thought that children subjected to a highly structured education would simply internalise meaningless prohibitions. In moving ahead with these “human and analytically interesting cases,” Aichhorn confirmed his belief that setting up local educational counseling offices in Vienna’s fourteen district youth offices would give him more latitude than a standard government post. Aichhorn, whose postwar educational activities aimed to embed psychoanalysis within social welfare organisations, resumed the correspondence with Rosenfeld.
