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The Budapest School of Psychoanalysis, decimated of members in the years of the Nazis, the late 1930s and early 1940s and terminated by the Communist regime in 1948, continues to echo down the corridors of time with the voices of its talented and creative adherents who were remarkably contemporary in their reflections on psychoanalytic theory and technique. Brilliant thinkers and researchers such as Sándor Ferenczi, Sándor Radó, Otto Rank, Franz Alexander, Michael and Alice Balint, to name a few, have significantly contributed to the psychoanalytic opus but lesser lights like István Hollós have also made significant contributions that have remained buried until recently but re-discovered by a new generation of psycho-analysts who have recognized their worth. Hollós’ (1927) My Farewell to the Yellow House is one such lost work that has been translated from Hungarian to English by Adrian Courage in 2024.
Hollós was one of those rare psychiatrists who also trained as a psychoanalyst and brought with him to the “Yellow House” a keen desire to understand the meaning of his charges’ psychotic ramblings and bizarre behaviors. Written in 1927, the book is a diary of Hollós’ experiences spanning a period of 20 years when he served as physician-in-chief of the National Psychiatric and Neurological Institute, named Lipótmező, the yellow exterior, huge building complex, in the hills of the Buda part of Budapest, was informally called by the people of the city “the yellow house,” or “sárga ház” in Hungarian. Told from a psychoanalytic perspective, he shares insights into the mind of the insane which he concludes is not very different from the so-called normal mind. Hollós brings up important issues about society's stigmatization of the mentally ill based on “fear of madness,” and the tendency to isolate the so-called insane from “normal” society in large psychiatric hospitals like Bedlam in London, Bellevue in NYC, and the Lipótmező – “the yellow house” – in Budapest, built in 18