Correspondence

Dear Editors,

In this letter I would like to offer a brief summary of the history of child analysis in Hungary. As it is only a letter and not an academic paper, personalities and ideas are referred to without aiming at completeness. I should also say that child psychoanalysis is only a part of the history of psychoanalysis in Hungary and should be seen as being deeply embedded in the historical and social circumstances of the period. Let me call your attention to Pál Harmat's book Freud Ferenczi und the ungarische Psychoanalyse (Edition Discord, Tubingen, 1988), which has served as a source for this letter and sets it in a proper context.1

We Hungarians take pride in the fact that one of the great figures of child analysis, Melanie Klein was born in Hungary and that her method of therapeutic work was nourished by Ferenczi's ideas and their personal relationship. In 1919, after delivering the lecture entitled ‘The Development of a Child’, she became a member of the Hungarian Psychoanalytical Association. Soon after that she moved to Berlin where she established her practice and began scientific research, settling in Britain some years later.

Child analysis, as it developed in Hungary, however, did not strictly follow Melanie Klein but was based rather on Anna Freud's work, and, on the whole, used a combination of both methods (e.g., therapeutic play has always been an important part of our work). However, the scope of the Budapest School and of child analysis in Hungary has a special feature, having been considerably widened by Imre Hermann's ‘theory of clinging’. Just as Melanie Klein had done, Hungarian child analysts have always studied the early mother-child relationship and the characteristics of the pre-Oedipal period, but in the light of this theory of clinging.