ABSTRACT
Since the beginning of its history, psychoanalysis in Hungary had developed in close connection with the progressive cultural and spiritual currents of the age. Interest in psychoanalysis commenced before the First World War, initially within the most enlightened circles of the liberal bourgeoisie. As free thinkers, psychoanalysts were in close contact with the Galileo Circle, Hungary's foremost radical intellectual movement before the First World War. The political and social radicalism of S. Ferenczi's early writings show a particularly deep impact of the thinking and values of the Galileo Circle. It should be emphasised that the revolution announced by Ferenczi was not revolution in the traditional political sense. He was a radical reformer of human relations, a Utopian rationalist in the spirit of Aufklarung. Excluded from the Budapest Medical Association and exiled to the margins of the existing order, Ferenczi apparently abandoned the area of social critique after the First World War.
