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This fascinating book of memories of the father of the Ferenczi's Renaissance is an important historical, social, and cultural documentation of a highly troubled period in Europe, and a vivid testimony of repeated traumatic dissolution of pre-existing forms and styles of life, which ultimately forced a young man to a risky and dangerous flight from Hungary after the anti-Soviet demonstrations of 1956, to re-create a new life in Switzerland. It is also the story of an important piece of the reorganization of psychoanalysis after World War II. It was prompted by a long and articulated interview between Judith Mészáros and André Haynal, which was published in Hungarian in 2012 (Haynal & Mészáros, 2012). It has been integrated with various materials, and contains two long chapters on depression and fanaticism, the topics of important contributions that the author made to psychoanalysis, philosophy, and culture (Haynal, 1976; Haynal, Molnar, & Puymege, 1980). Twenty-nine photographs from different periods of Haynal's life enrich the text.
The book begins with the narration of the Transylvanian roots of Haynal's family and the move to Budapest in 1919, after the desegregation of the Austrian-Hungarian empire. The author's father was a medical doctor, and later professor, who was repeatedly in trouble with authorities because of his independence of thought (during World War I, he was reported to the military court as a saboteur because he sent home half the men under his charge, and during the Nazi occupation he saved a number of Jewish people by hiding them in his clinic, receiving for this a posthumous Yad Vashem Award).
Born in Budapest in 1930, André Haynal grew at the intersection of three cultures: Protestant (to which his family belonged), Catholic (he attended Catholic schools), and Jewish (nearly all his father's colleagues were Jewish, and a Jewish uncle lived for many years in his house). After many vicissitudes – the war, the Nazi occupation, the siege of Budapes