Progress and Persecution in the Psychoanalytic Heartland: Antisemitism, Communism and the Fate of Hungarian Psychoanalysis

Abstract

In this paper, a historical story is unfolded that illuminates crucial and tragic elements of both Hungarian history and the particular history of Hungarian psychoanalytic culture, institutes, and individuals. The paper follows a set of tragic persecutions of Hungarian analysts, first those leading up to the Second World War, the Holocaust, and then during postwar period of Stalinism and the Cold War. This paper opens a story and a historical record of courage, betrayal, international aid, despair, and resilience.

The paper also sets this story in the context of the striking qualities of Hungarian psychoanalysis, beginning with Ferenczi. It is a tragic moment that a psychoanalytic movement, broadly interdisciplinary and linked to powerful forces of creativity and invention in many facets of theory of psychoanalysis and Hungarian culture, somehow surviving Nazism and Holocaust, finally became the victim of the Stalinist regime. The paper gives answers to the questions why and how psychoanalysis could be an enemy of the Stalinist dictatorship in Hungary. The paper charts the vitality and scope of psychoanalysis in Hungary and the terrible assaults that individuals and theories and institutions suffered over half a century.

Notes

This paper is based on a lecture given at the conference Berlin – Budapest | Psychoanalyse hinter dem Eisernen Vorhang, Collegium Hungaricum, November 14 to 16, 2008.

¹Hanna Peto—Andrew Peto's wife (1996), István Székács-Schönberger (1998), Lara—a patient of Mrs. Felszeghy (2004).

²Archives of the British Psycho-Analytic Society, Library of Congress, Archives & Special Collections The New York Psychoanalytic Institute.

³Antal Freund of Tószeg or Anton von Freund in German language was a chemistry businessman and one of the owner of the brewery Kőbánya, Budapest. He had multiple ties—personal, family, therapeutic, and philanthropic—to psychoanalysis, and in particular to Freud and Ferenczi. One of his sisters, Kata (Kata Lévy, 1883–1969), was married to Lajos Lévy, internist and psychoanalyst, friend and physician to both Freud and Ferenczi. His donation made possible to establish the Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, in 1919, in Vienna.

⁴About two thirds of the “people's commissars”—as ministers of the goverment were then called—and their deputies were Jews (Frank, 2009).

⁵See more about the social history of Jewish-Hungarian professonal refugees between the two world wars in Tibor Frank's (2009) recent published book Double Exile—Migration of Jewish-Hungarian Professionals through Germany to the United States, 1919–1945.

⁶See specifically about the emigration of the Hungarian psychoanalysts in Judit Mészáros' (2008) 'Az Önök Bizottsága' Ferenczi Sándor, a budapesti iskola és a pszichoanalitikus emigráció [“Your Committee”: Sándor Ferenczi, the Budapest School and the Psychoanalytic Emigration].

⁷For more on this theme, please see Cabré (1998), Gedo (1996), Haynal (2002), and Mészáros (2004).

⁸According to the official membership list sent to the IPA for that year (see International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 20, 498–515.)

⁹Of interest, Miklós Gimes is noted by many as a candidate of the Society—among them, Lívia Nemes and Pál Harmat (citing Nemes)—but his name does not appear on a single official list sent to the IPA (Harmat, 1994; Nemes, 1985).

¹⁰Between 1947 and February 8, 1949, when the Society was dissolved, Lilly Hajdu became its—very last—president.

¹¹When anti-Semitism rose in the early 1920s in Hungary, a decree was passed to send Hollós, who was only 50 at the time, to retirement from his position as a chair of a department at the so-called Yellow House (the nickname of the National Psychiatric Hospital because of its yellow walls.) In 1927 he wrote the autobiographical Búcsúm a Sárga Háztól [My Farewell to the Yellow House]. That work was translated into several European languages.

¹²Sandor Lorand and Sandor Rado were presidents and Robert C. Bak was the secretary and treasurer.

¹³Based on the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator, this would be exactly $2,921.15 in 2008.

¹⁴István Hollós was the vice president of the association, Vilmos Kapos was a secretary, and Adolf Fisch was a keeper of the minutes. Analysts were also represented in the various sections, including Tibor Rajka, István Hollós, Lillian Rotter, and Endre Pető, whereas René Amar sat on the Propaganda Committee.

¹⁵The association was formed within the physician's union (Thalassa, 1995 1–2, p. 225).

¹⁶György Lukács/Georg von Lukács, the son of an upper middle-class banking family, was educated in Germany. He first drew public attention with his influential writings in the 1910s: Soul and Form, The History of the Development of Modern Drama, and The Theory of the Novel, a seminal work in a new approach to intellectual history, as well as The Heidelberg Philosophy of Art and The Heidelberg Aesthetics. The latter was originally a single work that would make the Hungarian philosopher world famous when it was published as two volumes after his death. Lukács's History and Class Consciousness, published in 1923, became the best known and most debated work of philosophy in the first half of the 20th century and remains a standard work for liberal and leftist intellectuals both in Europe and North America to the present day.

The First World War confirmed for Lukács his rejection of capitalism. Like so many others, he saw the answer in leftist revolutions and therefore entered the Hungarian Communist Party in 1918. He held top positions in the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919 as People's Commissar for Education and Culture. He signed Ferenczi's nomination as a professor and chair of the newly founded Psychoanalytic Department at the Medical School of the Budapest University.

Lukács was the editor of the party's official paper, Vörös Újság (Red News), and political commissar for the Red Army to ensure allegiance to party principles. After the fall of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, he engaged in illegal party work, and later became a member of the Temporary Central Committee within Hungary's communist party in Vienna. As of 1930, he worked at the Marx-Engels Institute conducting research on the aesthetics of Marxism.

After the Second World War, Lukács returned to Hungary as an internationally renowned expert on Marxist philosophy and aesthetics. In Budapest, as professor of aesthetics, he took part in numerous theoretical, ideological, and political debates. His writings represent a radical criticism of bourgeois theories, and as such his impact was strongly felt in the liberal and leftist intellectual life of that period.

¹⁷Vilmos was a nickname of sorts reserved for István Tariska's family and friends (P. Tariska, personal communication, 2009). Tariska was a neurologist and psychiatrist. After 1945, he was a leading figure in the effort to stamp out psychology. In 1951, he was arrested, convicted in a show trial, and sentenced to several years' imprisonment. He was then rehabilitated in 1954. He would later head the National Institute for Neurology and Psychiatry in Budapest, between 1972 and 1986. This was the very same institute where Lilly Hajdu had been director in 1956.

¹⁸Experts in Hungary agree that the letter sent to Hermann and Hajdu expressed Lukács's opinion even if the copy of the original one that was found in the archives was not signed. (Official letters at that time were written by typewriter in double copies. One was sent, and the second one remained in the folders, without signature.) Hermann and Hajdu addressed their letter to Lukács. It is difficult to imagine that not Lukács himself but somebody else could send a reply. If that strange thing could happen it “would not had happened without Lukács's agreement” (Szőke, 1992. p. 42; in the reference). When Lukács served as a powerful member of the editorial board of the literary journal Fórum, he was a propagator and shaper of the ideological policies of the Hungarian Communist Party between 1945 and 1948.

¹⁹Dr. István Bálint (1912–1984) was a neurologist, psychiatrist, and Stekelian psychoanalyst. He was the chief physician for the ÁVO (later ÁVH) in the 1940s and 1950s. In 1955, he was sentenced to prison. He was a chief inspector for the Association for Mental Health Protection and worked on the staff of the National Institute for Occupational Health. Bálint worked with Dr. Ernő Szinetár, another analyst-neurologist and follower of Wilhelm Stekel, in preparing show trials (Erős, 2006).

²⁰The Rajk trial began several months after the dissolution of the Society. László Rajk became the first victim of a series of show trials designed to purge dissenters. In late May 1949, he was arrested on trumped-up charges, including spying, collaborating with the imperialists, and even cooperating with the secret police under the rightist Horthy regime. At the outset, Rajk denied it all, but when he was persuaded that the show trial would be no more than a demonstration of force to intimidate the “class enemy” and promised that, once he had made a full confession, he would be both spared the death penalty and rehabilitated as well, he finally confessed. The trial was broadcast on the radio as part of an effort of mass intimidation. Rajk was subsequently put to death on October 15, 1949. The ÁVH then took more than 100 people into custody, executing many and condemning many others to life imprisonment or internment (Romsics, 2000).

²¹At that time, “the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee was the largest nonpolitical organization dedicated to helping Jews in distress all over the world. Generally known as the JDC or “Joint” and headquartered in New York, the organization (until 1931) was called the Joint Distribution Committee of (the American) Funds for Jewish War Sufferers. It was founded on 27 November 1914 with the aim of centralizing allocations of aid to Jews adversely affected by World War I. […] Working in Hungary in 1946–1952, the JDC allocated $52 million for food, clothing, education, and social welfare. It was then accused of espionage and expelled (January 1953); many local Jewish figures who had worked with the JDC were arrested” (http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/American_Jewish_Joint_Distribution_Committee)

²²The interrogation record contains the names of a number of people who had given lectures, all of whom were supposedly analysts, for example, Drs. István Molnár and István Kulcsár (File No. VI/74. V-111 788).

²³Established in 1950 on the Soviet model of the KGB, the ÁVH, was in part a political police that operated in secret. Its primary objective was to hunt down anyone who challenged the communist regime and to protect that regime and its leaders. At the same time, the organization played a role in the power struggles within the communist party. It represented a means to settle political disputes and a way to enforce the outcome. Originally, this organization's predecessor, the ÁVO, the State Protection Department of the Hungarian State Police, had been established to seek out war criminals, but soon its mission was extended to people engaged in activities deemed unfriendly to Soviet rule in Hungary, in the course of which the ÁVO was not deterred from using false evidence and trumped-up charges. It flourished during the darkest era of Stalinism in Hungary, a period of constant fear of arrest and internment, and lasted from 1949 to 1953, when Stalin died. The situation eased after 1953, and particularly after the 1956 uprising.