The Portuguese Psychoanalytical Society organized a one-year cycle of conferences and workshops on Ferenczi, in order to deepen and discuss the work of one of the major pioneers of psychoanalysis. This cycle, started with Franco Borgogno, from Italy, in May of 2012 (who published “An unfinished fresco on Ferenczi as a person and as a psychoanalyst” in our last Review - RPP 2013, 33(2) - that complements this interview), continued in September of the same year with Luis Martin Cabré from Spain, and finally, in May 2013, we received Judit Mészáros from Hungary, the homeland of Sándor Ferenczi, and a specialist on his life and work.
Judit Mészáros is a psychologist, PhD, a training and supervising analyst of the Hungarian Psychoanalytical Society. She is also training and supervising in psychoanalytic psychotherapy and short-term dynamic psychotherapy. Mészáros is an honorary associate professor at the Eötvös Loránd University - Budapest, as well as a staff member of the postgraduate education of European Training for Psychotherapy, Tündérhegy, Budapest. She is also a founding member and the President of the Sándor Ferenczi Society and of the International Ferenczi Foundation. She works in private practice as a psychoanalyst and psychotherapist. She was also a member of the Trauma Group at the European Psychoanalytical Federation.
Her research fields are the history of the Budapest School, the cultural-political background and exile of the psychoanalysts and the topic of trauma, which addresses the traumatization process, transgenerational effects and healing possibilities. She has written scores of papers and is the editor and author of several books, the most recent being: Ferenczi and Beyond. Exile of the Budapest School and Solidarity in the Psychoanalytic Movement during the Nazi Years will be published by Karnac Books at the beginning of 2014. She was the curator of several exhibitions on psychoanalysis embedded in cultural life and influenced by political/societal changes in the 20th century in Europe, among them in the Freud Museum, London, 2004; Gallery of the Open Society Archives, Budapest, 2006; and she was the scientific advisor of a documentary film on Ferenczi, ed.: Edit Szendi, Hungarian TV, 2001.
Ph.D., training and supervising psychoanalyst of the Hungarian Psychoanalytical Society affiliated with the IPA and President of the Sándor Ferenczi Society. E-mail:
Associate Psychoanalyst of Portuguese Psychoanalytical Society and IPA, teaching at the Lisbon Institute of PPS and working in private practice. E-mail:
ANA BELCHIOR MELÍCIAS (ABM): To start, we would like you to say a few words about the Hungarian Psychoanalytical Society, founded by Ferenczi in 1913. One hundred years now, in 2013, of a long and rich history…
JUDIT MÉSZÁROS (JM): Oh yes, the Society was founded by Ferenczi exactly a century ago with only five people who came from different parts of the culture. One of them was Sándor Radó, a medical student at that time, another one of them was a psychiatrist (István Hollós), who fought tirelessly for the liberation of patients suffering from psychosis in psychiatric hospitals. One of the founders was a literary person, later a leading figure of modern literature in Hungary (Ignotus). Lajos Lévy was an internist, a charismatic figure of the modern medical ward, who soon recognized the important link between body and mind from the psychoanalytic perspective and represented and taught psychoanalytic psychosomatics from the early 1910s. This small example of the list of the founders of the Hungarian Society shows how open minded Ferenczi was, being surrounded by interesting avant-garde people, and how psychoanalysis was embedded in the modernity of that time.
ABM: How do you see the importance of the Budapest School in the psychoanalytical movement?
JM: One of the most important questions is how it was possible that a school could exist without walls, director and students, and could still appear in the history of psychoanalysis as a school. It was Michael Balint who used the phrase Budapest School first, and he did not do so accidentally, because by the 20s and 30s a common approach and a similar way of thinking were established in numerous theoretical and therapeutic issues.
These included the recognition of the significance of the early mother-child relationship in personality development and psychopathological processes, as seen in the works of Ferenczi, Alice and Michael Balint, and later Margaret Mahler and René Spitz. The idea of “primary archaic object relations”, or “primary love”, emerged at the time used by Ferenczi, Michael and Alice Balint, defined as a decisive period from the perspective of personality development and psychopathology. In other words, attention was directed from the Oedipal period to the importance of the preverbal stage. Primary love is the privileged love that the newborn in an ideal case receives as a basic right from the mother/caregiver, for which he or she does not need to give anything in return. The newborn is loved because he or she exists. This is one of the most significant personality-shaping factors. If it is present, then it is the pillar of basic trust, if it is missing, that can lead to serious psychosomatic diseases or, in the worst case scenario, even to death (see Ferenczi's study, “The unwelcome child and his death instinct” from 1929). It follows from the basic principle of the early object relations that narcissism is a reaction to lack. And at this point, a significant number of the Budapest analysts surpassed the Freudian concept of early narcissism, which Melanie Klein and her London group took even further, supporting the concept of inborn primary narcissism. The other common denominator among the analysts representing the Budapest School can be grasped in the dynamics of the psychoanalytic process. In 1919, Ferenczi recognized countertransference as an indispensable tool in the relationship between the analyst and the analysand. By the 30s, in the Budapest analysts' approach, the transference-countertransference dynamics got integrated into the psychoanalytic process, including the first meeting – today one would say it appears during the first interview. Paul Roazen described it with a beautiful metaphor: “Hungarians
ABM: Tell us a bit more about this building process. The Hungarian Psychoanalytical Society subjected to those extreme political circumstances, kept on working-through, as we do in our clinic with very fragmented internal worlds…
JM: Just after the war, the Hungarian Psychoanalytical Society had 17 members and 6 candidates. The society focused on maintaining international contacts and reflected on urgent needs among both traumatized children and adults. In line with the tradition of the Hungarian Society, analysts continued to hold public talks. They spoke before teachers, social workers, kindergarten staff, and foreign affairs experts. Psychoanalysts became leaders in key public organizations in the field of mental health and education and in these capacities they had an influence on the upbringing of children in the present and the future, on training in mental hygiene, and on the work of public health organizations. Psychoanalysis moved back into the programme at the faculty of medicine in Budapest between 1945 and 1947. At the same time there was an active life in the society and the analysts continued their private practice.
A new era was begun in the history of European psychoanalysis. Now it was those who had faced the destruction of war and a new, long-term dictatorial or totalitarian regime who needed support. Hungarian analysts could count on the solidarity of peers. First announced in 1945, the assistance offered to the psychoanalysts who had survived the war and were now stuck in Europe. There was an unprecedented series of expressions of solidarity. The Ernest Jones Rehabilitation Fund was set up in London. In New York, in 1945 Robert Bak and others founded the Relief Committee for the Hungarian Psychoanalytical Society. These groups supported the Hungarian Society while it remained in existence and later supported colleagues living under very difficult circumstances in Budapest in the early 1950s.
A special mixed of mourning and hope in a better future characterized these years. A great many analysts – among them leaders of the society at the time – espoused communist principles. They believed that the new regime – based on Communist ideology – held the promise of a new society without discrimination, whether racial, ethnic, or national. They joined the communist party, but as analysts they soon came into conflict with party ideology. Hungary soon experienced the first anti-psychoanalytic attack in a journal article entitled “Freudianism as the private psychology of imperialism”. The leaders of the society attempted to intervene in this process, but when Georg Lukács, the well-known and, at the time, powerful Marxist philosopher dismissed them with the words “I would urgently request you comrades not to divert important ideological debates to the roadside of common demagoguery”, there was nothing they could do. Under political pressure based on ideology the Hungarian Psychoanalytical Society, which had been in continuous operation since 1913, dissolved itself at the very beginning in 1949. It would take another 40 years for the society to rebuild. Here I would like to emphasise two things. The first is that any kind of non-governmental organizations (NGO) were not allowed to continue their work in the new dictatorial regime. The second is that the Hungarian society
Fonte: Wikipedia commons
A new era was begun in the history of European psychoanalysis.
Now it was those who had faced the destruction of war and a new, long-term dictatorial or totalitarian regime who needed support.
ABM: What are the vicissitudes of psychoanalysis in Hungary nowadays?
JM: I firmly believe that psychoanalysis cannot exist or develop without being embedded in the culture of a society, since psychoanalysis is not only a method for healing, it is much more than that: psychoanalysis is a way of thinking about the unconscious motifs in us as well as the unconscious fields of force within the cultural, interpersonal and social processes that surround us. I cannot emphasize it enough because psychoanalysis has a future if this embededness can be established and maintained. During the past 25 years in Hungary, psychoanalysis reappeared in literature and arts, it became a part of the curriculum for the M.A. degree in psychology at several universities, and psychoanalysis is present in PhD programs as well. The Ferenczi Society played an undeniably great role in this revival process, setting it as an objective 25 years ago to develop interdisciplinary relations between psychoanalysis and social sciences in the area of the interpretation of social processes. The first Ferenczi conferences already reflected this complexity, and the annual conferences of the psychoanalytic society strive to open the door to a wider variety of social groups as well.
ABM: In what ways do Hungarian psychoanalysts see psychoanalysis in the world today?
JM: After 1989, Hungarian society welcomed psychotherapy, thus affecting psychoanalysis and other modalities as well. For example, in addition to the Hungarian Psychoanalytical Society, Hungary saw the formation of the Training Society for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy and the Group Analytic Society. Many of the members and candidate members of the psychoanalytic society also became members and training therapist in these other, specialised societies, thus enriching their knowledge, experiences. At the same time, the dynamic psychotherapeutic perspective was integrated into the work of a number of healthcare facilities, psychotherapy wards, and paediatric outpatient clinics and can now be selected as a method for those training to become psychotherapists. One major achievement has been the emergence in recent years of the psychoanalytic perspective in Master's degree programmes at some Budapest universities.
The activities of the Hungarian Psychoanalytical Society were integrated into those of the EPF and the IPA. Through a number of delegates, Hungarian candidates were present in the activities of executive committees of the IPSO for the Eastern Europe from the early 80s and have now been working for Europe, while our colleagues have made great efforts in the formation and governance of the Han Groen-Prakken Psychoanalytic Institute for Eastern Europe from its beginning as well as in the various working groups of the EPF and the IPA. With headquarters purchased by the society (located in a small apartment), it has provided homeliness and security for training programs and scholarly meetings. Moreover, with annual conferences and with a periodical that publishes papers from those conferences, the society has established a clear presence in scholarly life. It currently has 52 members and 10 candidates – twice as many as the membership of the earlier society as it struggled with the effects of emigration and the trials of history.
ABM: Tell us about the birth of the Sándor Ferenczi Society and of the International Ferenczi Foundation. What are their main objectives and in what ways do both organizations interact?
JM: The Ferenczi Society was founded in 1988, a year before the political and societal changes of the former Soviet bloc countries. It was an event of utmost significance at the time. The aim was to discover and continue Ferenczi's heritage, facilitate research into the theoretical development of the history of psychoanalysis, and offer a forum for the discussion of modern psychoanalytic issues. It is an interdisciplinary society, members can join of any scientific discipline, as long as they have a dialogue with psychoanalysis, including psychoanalysts, psychologists, historians, philosophers, or literary people. One of the main activities of the society is to create forums, like conferences. Among the 15 conferences – national and international – that were organized by or in cooperation with the Society, the title of the first international conference in 1991 was Toward the End of Millenary: Political Changes and Psychoanalysis, and the last one was held in 2012 in Budapest with the title: Faces of Trauma. We also established a journal called Thalassa, which was the periodical of the Society.
The Society has collected a significant amount of original documents, photos, books, and valuable donated heritage of psychoanalysts, creating further opportunities for those who intend to conduct serious research. As one of the results of research in the history of psychoanalysis based on original documents, the Society took part in creating an internet database program – Psychoanalytic Document Database – in cooperation with the Freud Museum, Vienna and the Welcome Trust Library, London. The work was supported by the European Union's ‘Culture 2000 Program’ . We are so happy that this program was selected in 2008 as one of the ‘Best Practice’ projects between 2000 and 2006. It was really great to experience this international cooperation whose program coordinator
was Christian Huber, Sigmund Freud Privatstiftung.
It is a great honor that the Ferenczi Society received the Mary S. Sigourney Award of 2008 for significant contributions to the field of psychoanalysis – this is one of the most prestigious international acknowledgements in psychoanalysis.
You also asked about the International Ferenczi Foundation and the cooperation of the Ferenczi Society and the Ferenczi Foundation. One of the original aims of the Ferenczi Society was to establish a center and archives in the former villa of Sándor Ferenczi. Without the cooperation and mutual devoted work with the International Ferenczi Foundation this aim could not have been realized.
ABM: Could you give us an idea of what will be the next activities planned by Ferenczi Society and Foundation?
JM: The Society and the Foundation are planning a summer school program series, a one-week program about Ferenczi and the most recent theoretical, clinical contributions and their relevance for our daily clinical work. The next international Ferenczi conference will be in Toronto with the support of the Ferenczi Society, the International Ferenczi Foundation, the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society, and the American Journal of Psychoanalysis and of course the people of the Ferenczi network. In the last decades, the international Ferenczi conferences were organized in every 3 years in many countries, on
many continents. It has become a tradition. The main organizers are now our colleagues in Canada – the chair of the conference Endre Koritar, lives in Vancouver, one of the co-chairs, Josette Garon, in Montreal two members of the organization committee Erika Engel and Gavril Hercz, in Toronto. The title of the Toronto conference is, Heritage of a psychoanalytic mind. It will be held between 7 and 10 May, 2015. The main topics will be psychosomatics, the most actual questions about trauma, process of psychoanalysis and psychoanalysis and society. The first announcement will be sent out by March 2014, and you can get further info at
ABM: This year, we have the IPA Congress in Prague, whose theme, “Facing the Pain”, is very actual: it focuses on depression, affect regulation and symbolization. What do you think about the next International Congress in Boston, in 2015?
JM: I am personally very happy that the next congress will be in Boston, because I have many great friends there, psychoanalysis in Boston has rich traditions and, of course, Boston is one of the most beautiful and historic cities in North America. The theme of the conference is very topical: how we use the psychoanalytic tools in a changing world. Of course, psychoanalysis must react on the many changes that took place during the previous decades. Just think about the influence that the internet, the new virtual worlds and the amazingly transformed interpersonal communication exerted on every level of the development of personality or cultural, political and societal changes all over the world. Psychoanalysis, however, obviously needs to preserve its basic values and set of tools and at the same time has to develop its effectiveness, both as a therapeutic method and as a discipline: how to understanding the motivations and unconscious functioning of the human being, together with the countless manifestations thereof. Last but not least maybe psychoanalysis can offer a pinch of hope for positive possible changes as well.
were aware that psychoanalysis was a two-way street.“ The Budapest School can be associated with early psychoanalytic psychosomatics, which was mentioned above, including names like Ferenczi, Lévy, Balint, and later Alexander, or with the new interdisciplinary field of psychoanalytic anthropology created by Géza Róheim, or the direction of psychoanalysis toward pedagogy, including the view of psychoanalysis in kindergarten. The essence of the ideas represented by the analysts of the Budapest School was published in Hungarian, English and German from the 20s.
What is even more important, however, is that through their emigration these thoughts became widely known and had a fruitful impact on modern psychoanalysis, even if their origins were rarely recognized, mentioned or emphasized by later generations.
ABM: We would like to hear your thoughts on the consequences of the exile of the psychoanalysts and the survival of the Hungarian Society.
JM: I really appreciate your question because it touches upon the subject of exile on the one hand and survival after remaining in Hungary on the other hand. Analysts from Hungary left the country in two waves of forced emigration; both can be attributed to internal political events – even if the revolutions and counterrevolutions that took place in the country were, of course, influenced by the world wars and European political events. The first big wave of emigration began right at the beginning of the 20s, mainly as a consequence to the White Terror of Miklós Horthy (Regent and Head of State, 1920-1944) and the anti-Semitism stirred up by the short lived Soviet type Republic of Councils (1919), loss of territory of the country (1920), and economic decline of the country after the lost war. The restrictive measures and aggressive incidents characterizing the era made many members of the young intelligentsia leave, including not only scientists, and artists who later became famous but psychoanalysts and, as we would call them today, psychoanalyst candidates as well. Margaret Mahler, Melanie Klein, Sándor Radó, René Spitz, the Balint couple, or Franz Alexander left the country at this time. This was devastating but did not break the psychoanalytic community, however small it was (20-30 members). Nevertheless, the position of Budapest, which had previously been strong from the point of view of psychoanalysis, changed. The psychoanalytic community of Berlin started to develop quickly in the 20s – thanks partly to emigration – and played a leading role until the beginning of the 30s when Hitler came to power. The second exile of analysts started after the first anti-Semitic “Jewish law” was passed by the Hungarian Parliament (1938), when even those who had returned from Berlin, among them eg. the Balint couple, left the country for good. This second exile, followed by the emergence of Hungarian Nazism and the Holocaust, was a huge loss for the psychoanalytic group, but there still remained a small but all the more efficient and dedicated seed of the psychoanalytic community in Hungary who continued the work between 1945 and 1948, which was terminated on the organizational level by a Stalin-type communist dictatorship. Analysts were under so much political pressure that in 1948 they dissolved the first psychoanalytical society in Hungary that had been founded by Ferenczi. The emigration of European psychoanalysts, however, had a fruitful impact on the development of the modern psychoanalysis overseas. In my book – Ferenczi and Beyond: Exile of the Budapest School and Solidarity in the Psychoanalytic Movement during the Nazi Years – that will come out at the Karnac in February 2014, I provide a detailed description of the Emergency Committee on Relief and Immigration, the organization that was set up by the American analytical community, that made incredible efforts to help
Source: Wikipedia commons
their European colleagues escape the life-threatening situation in their home countries. After 1948, some of the analyst survivors who stayed in Hungary conducted their psychoanalytic activity for several long decades in a fragmented, underground manner. A slow building process was resumed by the forming of a Study Group in the 70s, and later the newly founded Hungarian Psychoanalytical Society became a component society of the IPA in 1989.
became “dangerous” not only because of its psychoanalytic stance, but also because some members helped the work of an organization created for orphaned Jewish kids supported by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, so they “supported” the aim of “Zionism” and the society also had relationships with “imperialism”, see for example the above mentioned Joint Committee, or colleagues from the US.
The early stage of the Soviet system in Hungary can also be called a system of suspicion and fear. Psychoanalysis could no longer be practised openly. Still, there were a few who carried on even during the most prohibitive period of the early 1950s. Most of the male analysts with a medical degree took work in district outpatient centres and state institutions and did not work as psychoanalysts until the early 1960s. It was mostly women who carried on the work of analysis in the most restrictive years. Among them the most influential was Lilli Hajdu the last president of the Ferenczi's original society.
Sporadically in the fifties and more frequently in the 60s and 70s, some former members of the society continued psychoanalytic activities, treatments, training analysis and seminars. Imre Hermann's seminars began in the early 60s. Nobody was prosecuted because of her/his psychoanalytic activities, but two analysts were falsely accused and arrested in the early 50s. One was tortured.
A slow reintegration started in 1975, when the fragmented circle of psychoanalysts set up a study group with the leading figure: George Hidas. It was not until 1989, that the Hungarian Psychoanalytical Society became again a full member of the international psychoanalytic community, a component society of the IPA.
The democratic transition in Hungary also began in the same year. The “Iron Curtain” between Western Europe and the Eastern Bloc was cut, the Berlin Wall fell, and a new chapter opened that would alter the development of psychoanalysis in Europe.
ABM: One of your major subjects of interest is the trauma theory and the traumatization process. How do you see its transgenerational implications both on a social-historical and personal level?
JM: We live in a country in which there is no layer of society, ethnic group or family that did not experience serious losses and trauma during the last three-four generations. At the same time, we live in a country that has not been able to relate to its own past in a reflective way, with a need to process what happened. In other words, it has not been able to face its own responsibility in faulty decisions, not only on the level of the leading political elite, but also in the area of civilians' everyday life. When a country is engaged in wrangling over whose tears are more bitter, then we can take it for granted that the possibility of finding a common denominator is still far away. If you are asking me about trauma, what I find to be the biggest difficulty is that rightwing political forces in Hungary that shape people's views still strengthen a traumatized image of the nation, a kind of narcissistic clinging to the status of the traumatized innocent victim. This, of course, strengthens nationalism and weakens the autonomous personality development of individuals that could otherwise be fostered by the complex but painful process of facing the trauma. On the level of society, facing trauma is inevitable for the establishment of democratic coexistence and a social process that is based on mutual understanding and possesses the ability to make compromises. Once a patient of mine said that even though he came to analysis because of his own traumatized childhood, without working through his traumas he would pass on to his own children everything that he had “inherited” from his parents and grandparents as transgenerational trauma. The same applies to social processes, and in this respect, as opposed to many other European countries, Hungary is greatly lagging behind.
ABM: In your opinion, why has there been a recent international revival of Ferenczi's work?
JM: The emergence of this Renaissance obviously has numerous components. One of them is that Ferenczi represents the missing link to understanding those processes in theory and technique that
were not evident before and, at the same time, understanding the relationship between the psychoanalyst and the analysand/patient in the healing process. Ferenczi attempted to understand the patient and simultaneously feel what was happening inside that patient, i.e. with countertransference and this complex approach, he transformed the psychoanalytic dialogue. Communication that stressed interpretation and therapy based on teaching was replaced by the need for emotional awareness and a reflective relationship of the unconscious processes of oneself and others, while focusing on the patient's current affective and cognitive capacities. The analyst and analysand enter into a mutually reflective relationship. Authentic communication on the part of the psychoanalyst becomes a fundamental requirement, as false statements result in dissociation and repeat the dynamic of previous pathological relations. In this new relationship security, the patient can go back to evoking and reliving emotionally the components of the traumatic event, which is the basis for processing (working through) the traumatic experience. Ferenczi represented the view that you should always be open to take into consideration phenomena that do not fit into the prevailing theoretical concept. Do not make it brief, bear the fact that you do not have an instant answer to a lot of things, pay attention to the patient and, simultaneously, pay attention to your own reactions, bear the tension generated by insecurity and do not shift the blame to the patient (e.g. resistance of the patient, etc.). If the case requires it, you should conduct research or read about others' research and new approaches so that with your newly acquired knowledge you can help your patients on a more secure basis.
Psychoanalysis is a process of liberalization that, at the same time, increases the maturity and autonomy of the individual. Ferenczi knew and represented the notion that this can only be achieved with a sovereign thinking analyst who is capable of self-reflection and self-correction, if necessary. He believed that nothing is carved in stone and that we have to learn to live together with our doubts as long as we do not get adequate answers to the emerging questions. I think that Ferenczi represented an attitude that, as an orientation in attitudes and approaches, constitutes help amid the crossfire of today's thousands of challenges.
ABM: This revival movement has awakened some of Ferenczi's ideas; mainly, the more active role of the analyst, but also, the empathic response as the basis of clinical interaction and the subjective experience of the analysand with its implications on the technique. In what ways do you think these ideas touch upon contemporary issues in psychoanalysis?
JM: The starting point was – if your question refers to the role of the therapist's activity – to figure out how we could make the work of psychoanalysts more efficient and the process itself shorter. Ferenczi was searching for answers to this question, and this question posed a problem that others were contemplating as well. So “research projects” started, that opened the way to this direction. An example for this was the research with active technique by Ferenczi, which he soon discarded, or Alexander's experiment later with the introduction of corrective emotional experience into the therapeutic process, which was also created as a result of the therapist's activity. The determination of the length of the therapy should also be mentioned here, which resulted in the facilitation of separation anxiety experiences – as was brought up by Otto Rank. The purpose, efficiency and length of the therapy were objectified later, in the middle of 1970s, as a method of short-term dynamic psychotherapy.
Speaking of the subjective experience, as you know, all experiences
are subjective. This is the essence of experiences. The questions will become interesting if we observe how the subjectivity of the experience relates to the truth? At this point I would like to bring up a thought that was worded by Ferenczi as well, touching upon the question of objective or subjective truth – in his very early article on Spiritism, in 1899 – that emerges when sensing phenomena. If we project this to remembrance work and the content of experiences, then the question emerges to what extent the experiences reflect the objective truth content of the given series of events. I do believe that from the perspective of the psychoanalytic process it is not a relevant question since we work with the content of the subjective experiences of the analysands and patients. We know well enough, from thousands of research results concerning traumatization, that during a trauma experiences get fragmented and ego-defence mechanisms influence access to memories in a number of different ways. These experiences go through changes during analysis, and working through them gets them arranged in a new narrative. I accept my patients' experiences the way they live through them, and I provide help during the working-through process to bring these experiences as close as possible to the complexity of reality and make sure they get integrated into the difficult chapters of my patients' life history in such a way that their emotional charge is not pathogenic any more. We draw a lot of support from the conscious handling of the transference-countertransference dynamics while making our patients understand in what way the defining relationships/feelings of their past are present in their current relationships and feelings.
The Foundation was established in 2007 to promote free discussion and non-dogmatic research on the history, theory and practice of psychoanalysis, and the transmission of psychoanalysis according to the spirit and legacy of Sándor Ferenczi. One of the most important first common tasks was the fundraising that we managed together in order to buy the original Ferenczi office in the former villa and create the International Ferenczi Center. You know how highly I think of solidarity and cooperation, since a part of my book also discusses this topic. I can say that several aspects of solidarity and cooperation were present in the extremely challenging fundraising process that lasted for years and, finally, reached its goal, which you could see in summer when you were in Budapest. On the wall of the Ferenczi Center, visitors can read the long list of donors, in the same space where Ferenczi wrote his Clinical Diary and conducted therapeutic work, with Elisabeth Severn, among others, and where his study entitled Confusion of Tongues was born, just to name a few important titles from those years. I would hereby like to mention two Italian colleagues of mine, Carlo Bonomi and Franco Borgogno – who also visited your Society, on the occasion of Ferenczi seminar – and the Associazione Culturale Sándor Ferenczi the members of which supported the 6-year-long fundraising all the way through. Finally, as they say, all is well that ends well: in 2011, the two organizations, the Sándor Ferenczi Society and the International Ferenczi Foundation, purchased together that part of the house that used to be Ferenczi's office and now is the home of the International Ferenczi Center.
See: ferenczi.it
The operation of the Hungarian Psychoanalytical Society and the Ferenczi Society was not always without difficulties even though a number of analysts and candidates were members of both societies. It bore the symptoms of “individuation-separation”, mirroring and repeating of numerous unreflected internal conflicts and processes, which were also characteristic of the whole Hungarian society, as well as of smaller professional communities. However, the past years have seen the gradual start of a process of spiritual integration, which we hope will provide new perspectives, creating optimal atmosphere and conditions for the future development of psychoanalysis.
ABM: Thank you so much for this interview and for allowing us to enjoy such a rich conversation with a “great-granddaughter” of Ferenczi, whose successful work has built strong bridges between the international world of psychoanalysis and Ferenczi's work, as well as the Hungarian Society.
JM: I would hereby like to say thank you for the invitation of the Portuguese Psychoanalytical Society. It was a great pleasure for me to work and be together with you. December 2013