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Andrew Feldmár, a Hungarian-Canadian psychotherapist now in his 80s, is widely published in Hungary. This translation of his open-hearted autobiography and account of the beliefs which have influenced the way he has lived his life and practiced his profession is his first book in English. It is a wide-ranging exploration of the people and texts—philosophical, anthropological and psychological—that have been most influential in his life.
As the title suggests, his ideas were profoundly affected by the Scottish psychiatrist and controversialist psychotherapist R. D. Laing, with whom he spent a heady year in 1974-1975 and whose role in questioning the psychiatric orthodoxies of the mid-20th century made him a leading figure in the counterculture of that time. Feldmár's Journal Entries from that period are the most fascinating part of the book, a form of time travel which throws us headfirst with him into the life of the shelters set up by Laing and his colleagues in the Philadelphia Association (PA), to house psychiatric patients in an environment which challenged the prevailing repressive ideas about mental health and illness. Feldmár has practiced a radical psychotherapy based on a Laingian anti-authoritarian ethos ever since—listening closely to the patient to help them discover how it is that they want to lead their life. Reading this text now allows us to experience something of how he got there.
It is not always a straight-forward read; however, taking my queue from Feldmár himself when he described his approach to some of the theoretical writing recommended by colleagues in London, I found the best way to read Credo was as if ‘I were swimming in it. If I don't agree with something or I don't understand something, I just swim through it and concern myself with the things I find interesting’. (142 p.) After all, the book is such a clarion call to individual freedom, to therapy as ‘a process by which patients find their own path’, (286 p.) that this feels in keepi