István Hollós: A Poet Patient's Personal ‘Dictionary’

István Hollós (1872–1957) was among the few early psychoanalysts, alongside Ferenczi, who dared to venture into the most uncharted territories of Freudian thought. What sets this Hungarian psychoanalyst apart is that, by listening to one of his patients, he managed to embrace the words he heard – however incomprehensible – in the patient's own language. This required him to set aside the medical conception of madness, as well as the search for meaning. Thus, he published his patient's poems not as symptomatic productions but as literary creations. This paper discusses Hollós's little-known 1914 piece, ‘On a Patient Who Recited Poetry’ [‘Egy versmondo betegröl’], published in the avant-garde literary journal Nyugat [The West], which remains untranslated into any language. In presenting the poetic productions of this young man, Hollós attempts to trace the sources of poetic inspiration. As he is not dealing with written texts but with the spoken language of his patient, he writes from the perspective of someone who encounters a certain strangeness in the language he hears. To convey his observations, he draws on elements of the patient's biography and reflects on the peculiar relationship the young man forms with both writing and speech. Moreover, to underscore the exercise he undertook to attune himself to these utterances, Hollós introduces a new element: the relationship with music. The aim of this article is to highlight how, by recounting his experience with this patient, Hollós enables the reader to perceive how he grappled – through writing, speech and music – with modes of expression that dispensed with meaning.