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Many years ago, David Haynal, then 8 years of age, piped up to say, “Papa, you have had a troubled life, you should write about it” (p. 5).
“Papa” is André E. Haynal, MD, beloved not only to David but to followers of the so-called Ferenczi Renaissance, a European psychoanalyst with distinguished credentials in both clinical and scholarly dimensions, who has long deserved to be far better known in North America. Over a lifetime that now spans eight decades, André Haynal, born in Hungary at a critical time in twentieth century world history, studied philosophy and psychology in Budapest before embarking on a medical career in Zurich, where he trained in neurology, neurosurgery, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis. As Professor and Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Geneva, he went on to hold major political and administrative offices in European psychoanalytic organizations, in addition to pursuing his own scientific work that now comprises many volumes and a multitude of articles and presentations. He was a key member of the committee established after the death of Michael Balint to oversee the eventual publication of the complete correspondence between Freud and the pioneering Hungarian psychoanalyst, Sándor Ferenczi, Freud's self-admitted “favorite disciple.”
From this unique vantage point, André Haynal has been both pawn and witness to political forces that sent him scrambling for survival through war, revolution, occupation, and persecution. Indeed, in the words of David Haynal, he has lived “a troubled life” not only historically but in the personal dimensions between the lines as well. To be sure, André Haynal has been using all this experience professionally to address in creative ways the organizational forces that distort the visible traces of history into constructed mythologies. David's request would mean not only facing this turbulent history but of figuring out how to write it.
A personal note: in the late 1980s, aware of my developing