ABSTRACT
In Psychoanalysis behind iron curtains, Ferenc Ero˝s argues that to understand the vicissitudes of psychoanalysis “behind the iron cur-tain”, we must go back to the beginnings of a history of the relationship between psychoanalysis, politics, and ideology. For a long time, the iron curtain between “East” and “West” separated the most important historical centres of psychoanalysis: Budapest from Vienna, as well as Berlin from Berlin. The term “iron curtain” should also be understood more widely than pertaining only to the cold war; impenetrable barriers have several times been erected between psychoanalysis and other disciplines, academic studies, theoretical currents, and therapeutic practices. Thus, following Young-Bruehl and Schwartz (2008), it is argued that the history of psychoanalysis can be understood as a trauma history, a repetitive pattern of splits and distortions; it is a discipline fragmented into several histories rather than one history. When Wilhelm Reich declared in 1929 that “Psychoanalysis has a future only in socialism”, psychoanalysis had already disappeared from the scientific and cultural scenes of the Soviet Union. His naïveté was representative of a whole generation of psychoanalysts and other intellectuals; Stalin’s total victory over Trotsky in the late twenties dealt a final blow to the earlier tolerant, even supportive attitude of the Soviet authorities. The belief
that psychoanalysis had a future in National Socialism was adapted a few years later by a few non-Jewish members of the German Psychoanalytic Society, and by Ernest Jones and other IPA leaders. Following the exclusion of Jewish members from the German association, its sad remnants were merged into the so-called Göring Institute a few years later. The exile of most psychoanalysts after Hitler’s victory in 1933 signified the end of classic Central European analysis. Founded by Sándor Ferenczi in 1913 and maintaining the tradition he started, the Hungarian Psychoanalytic Association managed to survive the Nazi period and the Holocaust, though within a few years the cultural and political climate changed dramatically. Psychoanalysis was subjected to harsh attacks where its alleged support for imperialism was linked with accusations about “Freudianism as a Jewish science”. The postwar left intelligentsia, psychoanalysts included, tended to deny or conceal their Jewish roots, and practice continuous self-criticism to remove the remaining traces of bourgeois ideology. Just before the ban on all non-governmental organisations and private associations in 1949, the Hungarian Psychoanalytic Association announced its own dissolution, though “underground analyses” were performed by some, such as Imre Hermann, who even trained a few candidates. Lilly Hajdu-Gimes, who had suspended her psychoanalytic activity, became the director of the central psychiatric hospital in Budapest. Eager to conform to the ideological expectations, emphasising Pavlov’s significance and denouncing Freud, she also initiated important modernising reforms within mental health. Forced to retire from her hospital position after her son Miklós Gimes was arrested and later executed, she resumed her psychoanalytic praxis, and started reorganising the group of psychoanalysts. After repeated failures to get an exit permit, she committed suicide in 1960. Lukács was also forced to practice self-criticism; literature was a pretext in the famous Lukács debate; its hidden agenda concerned the splits within the party leadership in the transitions to socialism. In the brief revolutionary government led by Imre Nagy in 1956, Lukács became minister of culture, a position which lasted only a few days. In contrast to Imre Nagy, Miklós Gimes, and many others, he survived the post-revolutionary retaliations and purges, and continued to exert a decisive influence on Hungarian culture and philosophy. Lukács opposed psychoanalysis throughout most of his life, the critique of “psychologism” being one of the leitmotifs in History and Class Consciousness (1923), but this work was also an important source of the
critical theory of the Frankfurt school and the idea that psychoanalysis may explain why the revolutionary movements after the First World War had failed; why the masses rather than changing the existing relations of production, became followers of extreme right-wing movements and parties. Ferenczi had served as doctor in the Hungarian Army from 1914 to 1918, and at the end of the war the Austro-Hungarian authorities accepted psychoanalysis as a legitimate treatment for serious war neurosis (Ero˝s, 2010b). This was the main topic of the fifth international psychoanalytic congress, held in Budapest in late September 1918, of which Freud wrote to Abraham: “It is to be expected that Budapest will now become the headquarters of our movement” (Freud, 1918, p. 382). Petitions by students to introduce psychoanalysis into the regular medical training were repeatedly turned down on the grounds that “It propagates immorality and pornography, and most of the students who signed the petition were women” (Ero˝s, 2009). In fact, it is argued, only less than half of the petitioners were women, though another objection may have been more decisive; more than seventy percent of those who signed the petition were Jewish. Shortly afterwards, in 1920, the Hungarian national assembly introduced a law which limited the number of Jewish students allowed to study at universities, the first anti-Jewish law in Central Europe (Kovacs, 1994). Ferenczi was proud to become the “world’s first professor of psychoanalysis”, but it was a position which lasted only a few weeks. After the defeat of the first Hungarian communist regime on 1 August 1919, he was among the, mostly Jewish, professors immediately fired from their positions. A year later he was also excluded from the Medical Association. “After the unbearable ‘Red terror’, which lay heavy on one’s spirit like a nightmare, we now have the White one,” he wrote to Freud on 28 August, and continued that he would “take this trauma as an occasion to abandon certain prejudices brought along from the nursery and to come to terms with the bitter truth of being, as a Jew, really without a country” (Ferenczi, 1919c). When the “iron curtain” came down in August 1919, Ero˝s concludes, psychoanalysis fell victim to marginalisation, persecution, and exclusion.
