An Oeuvre that Parallels the Genesis of Today’s Psychotherapy

Abstract

BUDA, B. (2004) Pszichoterapia: Kapcsolat es kommunikacio (Budapest: Akademiai) 524 pp., ISBN: 963 05 8154 X, HUF 4,400. ‘In communication, the signal “the following don’t have to be taken seriously” has to be taken seriously’, is the old paradox of the anthropologist Gregory Bateson which launched a new paradigm in the psychological and social scientific thinking of the 20 th century. Indeed, this framing, as well as the distinction between the object level and meta-level is such an ‘archaic’ phenomenon that it can already be discovered in the social contacts of the higher-ranking animals, such as beavers, dogs, predators, and anthropoid apes. They, too, are able to communicate that their ‘aggressive’ behavior is only a game. In the case of humans, this meta-communicative level can qualify the contents of direct communication, just as much as the relationship between the communicating parties, or otherwise, the situation of the communication (or all these at the same time). Its general characteristic is, therefore, that there is communication going on about communication. In that sense, this immense book is also a meta-communicative work. In the monographic integration of B. Buda’s oeuvre of (so far) sixty volumes, it is not only his own school within the profession of psychotherapy that he characterises with the subtitle Rapport and Communication, but with an overview one meta-level higher. He communicates the whole of the discipline (its theory and practice) as, first and foremost, ever more complex and integrated communication. He directs the object level of the fifty themes within the 12 sections of the work with comments from the meta-level of the interposed integrating-interpreting reflections: from the socio-cultural background of healing through the models and effect mechanisms of psychotherapy, and on the basis of introducing the criteria of effectiveness, strategic view, and integrative options of its schools to the core-themes like ‘empathy’, ‘language and communication in the Stanford school’ or the ‘semantic theory of the unconscious’, and through several other application fields and border problems towards the philosophical climax written in the defense of the psychotherapic way of looking, with the title: ‘Mind and body: The (cultural and scientific) history and relevance of a (pseudo-) problem from the point of view of today’s psychiatry’. In as much as both are aimed at integration, this great summarising attempt of the author parallels one of his most significant integrative achievements: the discovery of the system-theoretical resultant of psychoanalytical therapy and the semantic theory of the unconscious. What in the course of psychoanalytic therapy takes place, is a strengthening and an integration of the semantic system of the self, i.e. of the conscious part of the ego, which