One peculiar omission in Perry Anderson’s influential discussion of Western Marxism is his minimal interest in the attempts that were made to fuse the influence of Freudian psychoanalysis with the Marxist tradition in the 1920s. This lack of interest also affects his treatment of the Frankfurt school of critical theory, which is reduced to its philosophy and aesthetics, and blamed for the lack of strategic thinking during the decades preceding 1968. With the examples of Wilhelm Reich and Erich Fromm, this article shows that Freudomarxism instead originated in a deep knowledge of the life of the working class and the reasons behind its inability to withstand fascism in Central Europe, a knowledge founded in the practice of the free clinics started on Freud’s own initiative at the end of the First World War. It is suggested that this heritage has a lot to tell us in contemporary struggles against populism and state repression.