This paper discusses István Hollós's intervention in thinking about madness and psychiatric care, through his manifesto My Farewell to the Yellow House, written in 1927 and recently published in its English translation (1968 Press, 2024). Raluca Soreanu responds to Gloria Leff's paper in this issue, and puts the Yellow House book in dialogue with Hollós's 1914 piece, ‘On a Patient Who Recited Poetry’. Soreanu places Hollós's conception of language in the context of the Budapest School of Psychoanalysis and reflects on some of his philosophical affinities and on the ethical implications of his work. Ultimately, what traverses Hollós's texts is an ethics of opacity, which recognizes the languages of the Other. The paper also discusses Hollós's actuality, and the way his work on madness sparked a collective sound project, a sound art piece, and a response by a sculpture-artist – all engaging madness in its paradox of multi-tonal music without a community.

István Hollós (1872–1957) was among the few early psychoanalysts, alongside Ferenczi, who dared to venture into the most uncharted territories of Freudian thought. What sets this Hungarian psychoanalyst apart is that, by listening to one of his patients, he managed to embrace the words he heard – however incomprehensible – in the patient’s own language. This required him to set aside the medical conception of madness, as well as the search for meaning. Thus, he published his patient’s poems not as symptomatic productions but as literary creations. This paper discusses Hollós’s little-known 1914 piece, ‘On a Patient Who Recited Poetry’ [‘ Egy versmondo betegröl’], published in the avant-garde literary journal Nyugat [ The West], which remains untranslated into any language. In presenting the poetic productions of this young man, Hollós attempts to trace the sources of poetic inspiration. As he is not dealing with written texts but with the spoken language of his patient, he writes from the perspective of someone who encounters a certain strangeness in the language he hears. To convey his observations, he draws on elements of the patient’s biography and reflects on the peculiar relationship the young man forms with both writing and speech. Moreover, to underscore the exercise he undertook to attune himself to these utterances, Hollós introduces a new element: the relationship with music. The aim of this article is to highlight how, by recounting his experience with this patient, Hollós enables the reader to perceive how he grappled – through writing, speech and music – with modes of expression that dispensed with meaning.

This paper examines the relationship between Winnicott and his female BBC radio broadcasting producers, making extensive use of archival material from the BBC archives. Winnicott's success as a broadcaster was a product of his collaboration with Janet Quigley, Isa Benzie and a line of other female producers. These women played a crucial role in transforming his theoretical insights into accessible and engaging radio content, shaping public understanding of childcare and psychoanalysis in mid-century Britain. Their influence demonstrates the vital contributions of female media professionals in shaping intellectual history. By acknowledging their role, we gain a fuller understanding of how Winnicott's broadcasts achieved their lasting impact.

The article gives an overview of Sigmund Freud's changing theories on masturbation and autoeroticism. After outlining the historical background, i.e. the medical, psychiatric and pedagogical fight against masturbation in Europe from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, the article traces four basic lines of Freud's theoretical development: (1) the establishment of the concept of masturbatory neurasthenia and the decreasing adherence to this concept; (2) the replacement of the seduction theory with a theory of endogenous sexual development based on autoeroticism; (3) the successive recognition of infantile alloeroticism; and (4) the continuing ambivalences with regard to sexual education and their ultimate answer through the theorem of the castration complex. Finally, it will be discussed how Freud takes up the complexes of the modern fight against onanism and transforms them with great cultural impact. Since Freud had reservations about the assumption that masturbation was harmless, but paved the way for a new conception of child masturbation with his theory, he can be seen as a revolutionary against his will.