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Anna Borgos introduces the reader to the burgeoning psychoanalytic scene in Budapest in the early years of the psychoanalytic movement. At that time the Budapest School was one of the most active psychoanalytic research and training centers along with Vienna, Berlin, and Zurich. Her access to personal correspondences, untranslated works and diaries, newspaper articles, and historical information provides the reader with an in depth historical and cultural background as well as portraying intimate details of personal relationships. The principal protagonists spring to life on the written page as Borgos interweaves details of their personal lives with their brilliant contributions to psychoanalytic research and technique, but adding a third dimension: an approach applicable to childhood education and child rearing. Unlike the Viennese and Berliners, those in the Budapest School believed that environmental trauma especially in early development contributed significantly to the etiology of psychopathology. In this sense, focusing on efforts to enlighten parents, caretakers, and teachers with psychoanalytic perspectives of development represent an attempt at social engineering cultivating mental health in the developing child.
In contrast to the Viennese focus on psychosexual development culminating in the Oedipal conflict and resolution, the Budapest School focused on pre-Oedipal development.
The chief characteristics of the Budapest School can be grasped in the following tendencies: interest in the early, pre-Oedipal attachment and mother-child relationship; the problem of trauma; curing psychotics; emphasizing inter-subjectivity in therapeutic relations; the importance of the therapist's countertransference; a more active analytic technique; specific features of training (supervision by one's own analyst); pedagogical application; social relations; and cultural interactions and interdisciplinary openness to social sciences such as ethnology and sociology. (p. 2)
The Buda