Book review : From Budapest to Psychoanalysis
In the 2023 book From Budapest to Psychoanalysis - Three Portraits and their Analytic Frames edited by V. Csillag (Routledge), each of the three authors retrace in their own autobiographical chapter how they grew up in communist Hungary before emigrating to a foreign country in the West: Csillag to the USA, Lanczi to the UK and Vamos to France. They recall in their own way how, as adults, they decided to train to become psychoanalysts. During the years that followed the Second World War, in Hungary, a Russian occupied communist country, it was taboo to talk or write about the Holocaust, the concentration camps, and the Jewish population in general. While the three authors were born after the war, m any members of their parents’ generation were survivors or victims or of the horrors of Auschwitz – Birkenau and other concentration camps. They were submitted to violent, brutal, inhumane conditions and left behind many loved ones who perished. No one in Hungarian society spo...