Last summer, at the Freud Centre In Jerusalem, I met two colleagues from Budapest who Instantly recognized my Hungarian origins. When they learned that I had left the country in 1939 and never returned, they urged me to visit my former home and to make contact with the newly reestablished Hungarian Psychoanalytic Society. To add to the sense of belonging, we discovered that one of my cousins, the Budapest neurologist Eva Czecze, was well known to this analytic community. When I decided to accept their invitation, I asked some of them to search out another long-lost relative, the journalist Gabor Antal; it turned out that he was another familiar within the analytic circle, being the only person to have written favorably about psychoanalysis during the long years of its official proscription.
Our Hungarian colleagues are justifiably proud of the unbroken tradition of psychoanalytic activity in Budapest since the early years of the century….
By coincidence, I reached Budapest on the day of the first free elections since 1945, an event that did not seem to dispel a national mood of despair, cynicism, and foreboding. I was stunned to find that living conditions are infinitely worse than accounts in the American press had led me to believe; while the public face of the city retained its former charms, behind this facade is a society in prostration— the very fabric of a social contract in tatters. On Hungarian television- to my astonishment I was able to follow it with ease- eminent intellectuals, dressed in the clothing of Westerners in poverty, gave voice to the general yearning for dignity and honor, as well as to the prevalent pessimism about more pragmatic concerns.
The contrast between this mood of national catastrophe and the buoyancy of the psychoanalytic community was truly impressive. Not only is the Psychoanalytic Society solidly established in dignified quarters (on Lenin Boulevard! There is no money to change street signs, and such traces of Soviet imperialism are likely to persist for some time …); a Ferenczi Society has been launched to engage in interdisciplinary endeavors, and the first issue of its new journal, Thalassa, has just been published. A nest of academics at one provincial university was interested in my coming to meet them— an inviting prospect for a potential return visit.
Our Hungarian colleagues are justifiably proud of the unbroken tradition of psychoanalytic activity in Budapest since the early years of the century- a tradition maintained underground during the darkest years of Stalinist oppression. After the 1956 revolution, the reformist Communist regime no longer prohibited psychoanalytic work (although it was more prudent to call it “dynamic therapy”), particularly by those who had officially retired. The elderly Imre Hermann and a handful of others were thus able to offer analyses to interested persons; needless to say, for the most part these were younger mental health professionals. As Communist intransigence waned, the analytic group was allowed to forge links with the International Association, and the Hungarian Society was formally reconstituted at the recent Rome Congress. There are currently four Training Analysts and 33 candidates in Budapest.
I was introduced to the vibrancy of this group at a seminar for many of the candidates at the home of the member who had the most commodious quarters, in a formerly gracious building now close to ruin for lack of maintenance. Not everyone present was able to follow my English, and I needed at least another month in the country to overcome my expressive aphasia in Hungarian. We managed to communicate in a goulash of bilingualism, largely through the good offices of Dr. Zsuzsa Varga, who also translated the paper I was to present to the full Society on a subsequent evening.
To talk to these colleagues, insulated from the wider analytic world and the publications of the past 50 years (even now, they cannot possibly afford subscriptions to the foreign periodicals)
was like a trip in a time machine. To be sure, the analysis they stood for was not that of Vienna or Berlin, but that of the school of Ferenczi as continued by Hermann, Michael Balint, Robert Bak, Livia Nemes. Thus, the students showed no concern about questions of analyzability and presented clinical contingencies that would challenge the most courageous among us. I heard about a patient whose presenting complaint was that he was being persecuted by a Jewish cabal; he is the son of a former high official of the secret police.
Before my presentation to the Society, I was taken to dinner at the famous cafe/restaurant where Ferenczi had been a habitue. The magnificent room, worthy of the Paris of the belle epoque, had seen better days, but its name was just being changed back to what it was before the Soviet occupation, the New York! Caricatures of the intellectual circle to which Ferenczi belonged, “The West,” still adorned the walls of the restaurant. The cuisine, alas, was not up to antebellum standards.
I had offered the Hungarians a choice among several papers; to my surprise, they chose an interdisciplinary topic, an essay on the adolescence of Mozart. The lively and sophisticated discussion following my reading of the Hungarian text (what an adventure!) suggested that this choice may have been dictated by the desire of my hosts to show themselves at their best, without the handicaps that 50 years of isolation have imposed on them with regard to the central subject matter of our discipline. Indeed, everyone in that crowded room seemed to be a devotee of Mozart, as well as of Freud.