ABSTRACT
The phrase “iron curtain” has multiple significations. Literally, it means a real, physical object: the iron curtain which goes down at the very end of a theatrical performance. It also means impenetrable obstacles in a more general sense: barbed wires, fences, walls, mines that separate physical spaces, blocking and defending the boundaries between them. Metaphorically, the term “iron curtain” is associated with the long-lasting division of Europe, the political, military, economic, ideological, and cultural division between “East” and “West” which started after the Second World War, and lasted, politically and militarily at least, until the demolition of the Berlin wall in 1989. The iron curtain between “East” and “West” was a division line which separated, for a long time, the most important historical centres of psychoanalysis: Budapest from Vienna, and Berlin from Berlin, too. The Czech writer Milan Kundera once described Central Europe, the birthplace of psychoanalysis, as “a kidnapped Occident,” a “piece of the Latin West which has fallen under Russian domination … [and] which lies geographically in the centre, culturally in the West and politically in the East” (Kundera, 1984). After the end of this “kidnapped” position,
we have learnt much about the measure of the marginalisation, persecution, exclusion, or repression psychoanalysis had to suffer in the countries of the former “Eastern block”—but about its underground existence and extraordinary survival capacity, too (Ash 2010; Ero˝s 2010a; Haynal, 2010; Simon, 2010).
