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Reading this book, committed to shedding light on women who had been virtually written out of mainstream history, was a deeply moving and informative experience for me. With great detail and precision, Anna Borgos has reconstructed the biographies of the little-known Hungarian female psychoanalysts active in the early stages of the development of the Freudian movement. One of the greatest strengths of this book is that it places their fascinating stories within a broader context of social, political and cultural transformations that inflamed early twentieth-century Hungary and Europe. Borgos probes the intersection of psychoanalysis, femininity and Jewishness through a lens of a cultural, social and personal women's historian.
In this book, the first chapter is devoted to a description of the beginnings and early developments of Hungarian psychanalysis and the so-called Budapest School of Psychoanalysis, centred around Sándor Ferenczi. With great skill and insight, Borgos draws complex links between politics and the history of the movement, then almost exclusively Jewish. She evocatively captures the volatile socio-political circumstances of the collapse of the Habsburg Empire in 1918 and the intense political turmoil that followed. In the next two years, a short-lived pacifist First Hungarian Republic was swiftly replaced by an equally transitory communist Hungarian Soviet Republic unofficially headed by Béla Kun. The fall of the Soviet government was in turn followed by the so-called ‘White Terror’ targeting communists, social democrats and Jews. Then, in March 1920, the Kingdom of Hungary was re-established with a conservative royalist and fascist, Miklós Horthy, as its Regent. The main focus of the book is on the inter-war period, but Borgos continues to describe the complex intertwining of European psychoanalysis and the events of the Second World War, the Holocaust and the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. Hungarian psychoanalysis was developing, transforming and figh