Progress and Persecution in the Psychoanalytic Heartland: Antisemitism, Communism and the Fate of Hungarian Psychoanalysis

Abstract

In this paper, a historical story is unfolded that illuminates crucial and tragic elements of both Hungarian history and the particular history of Hungarian psychoanalytic culture, institutes, and individuals. The paper follows a set of tragic persecutions of Hungarian analysts, first those leading up to the Second World War, the Holocaust, and then during postwar period of Stalinism and the Cold War. This paper opens a story and a historical record of courage, betrayal, international aid, despair, and resilience. The paper also sets this story in the context of the striking qualities of Hungarian psychoanalysis, beginning with Ferenczi. It is a tragic moment that a psychoanalytic movement, broadly interdisciplinary and linked to powerful forces of creativity and invention in many facets of theory of psychoanalysis and Hungarian culture, somehow surviving Nazism and Holocaust, finally became the victim of the Stalinist regime. The paper gives answers to the questions why and how psychoanalysis could be an enemy of the Stalinist dictatorship in Hungary. The paper charts the vitality and scope of psychoanalysis in Hungary and the terrible assaults that individuals and theories and institutions suffered over half a century.