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Leaving the mother, the motherland and the mother tongue takes courage. The confrontation with a “foreign” reality requires stamina, becoming an immigrant necessitates bravery. This book is a narrative in three voices told by three women from Budapest, Veronica Csillag, Katalin Lanczi, and Julianna Vamos, former schoolmates, who decide to tell the story of their emigration from Hungary. The narratives of a trio provide the reader with an interesting perspective enriched by the unique subjectivity of each author. The last part of the title to Psychoanalysis suggests from the outset that this adventure was not easy and each one reached out for the support of a psychoanalyst. Psychoanalysis, a path to self-knowledge, became essential for all three of them to navigate as “foreigners” in a new land.
What is considered as immigration/emigration in today's Globalized World where travel for many people has become a mundane part of life? In the “Western World” tourism for young graduates is a regular custom, part of their education before choosing a career. In Eastern Europe, in Hungary this was almost impossible before 1989, after the fall of the “wall” that separated the Russian bloc from the “West.” This political “wall” needs to be present in the mind of the reader.
The introductory chapter by Judit Mészáros sets the historical background and facilitates understanding of the three narratives. The title, From Budapest to Psychoanalysis, is a somewhat perplexing title, seemingly simple but packed of complication. When we are told that each author is of Jewish origin and we learn about the catastrophic history of Hungarian Jews during WWII, the endemic anti-Semitism in Hungarian history, we realize that these stories are not straightforward. Could one say that the travels of these three women (born between and ) are not of the “gap-year” kind so common in the West? They are not alone when they leave Budapest, they are in fact “schlepping” three generations of ancestors with