ABSTRACT
In the early 1950s, several fields of psychology were suppressed in countries behind the Iron Curtain as Stalinism accused them of being “bourgeois sciences” (Kovai 2016). After the death of Stalin, the political repression of Hungarian psychology diminished, and the discipline showed a gradual comeback (Bodor, Pléh, and Lányi 1998; Szokolszky 2014) through the reinstatement of the scientific field. Following the path of critical researchers (Harris 2009; Parker and Shotter 2015), who challenge the traditional histories of psychology that pretend to be objective and highly intellectual, I argue that the impact of psychology’s reinstatement during the Kádár era can only be understood through the specific political context and personal relations, which were mostly masked in earlier sources that touched on this period. Relying on in-depth interviews with academics of the period, the story of reinstatement becomes highly subjective, and divergent ideas on the role and future of psychology appear in line with power relations in the politicized scientific field. Consequently, the success of a disciplinary field and the position of institutes will be analyzed with special attention to personal and political networks that defined them. This chapter reveals the patterns of the politicization of Hungarian psychology’s reinstatement on three levels: the evaluation of professional relations, the definition of what real psychology is, and institutional circumstances.
