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From Budapest to Psychoanalysis: Three Portraits and their Analytic Frames

Author(s) : Veronica Csillag, Author(s) : Katalin Lanczi, Author(s) : Julianna Vamos

Reviews and Endorsements

'Three Hungarian immigrant women recall and examine their personal and psychoanalytic journey in this stimulating book of origins and on-going transformations. They movingly affirm that the making of a psychoanalyst is inseparable from personal and professional maturation. Through writing this book they re-find each other and connect with a deep understanding of themselves. The book beautifully shows the authors' diversity and similarity, the powerful ingredients of any New Beginning.' - Giselle Galdi is Editor in Chief of the American Journal of Psychoanalysis and a training and supervising analyst at the American Institute for Psychoanalysis.

'Three women in three voices present their remarkable journeys from Budapest to psychoanalysis. This original book has the texture of a fabric woven with different threads. History with a capital "H" has impacted their individual and generational trajectories. They journey through different countries, as well as through languages. Their ability to mobilize themselves towards singular and creative orientations is a testimony to their perseverance and vitality. In the background, psychoanalysis proves to be an endless resource.' - Armelle Hours is a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and member of the SPP IPA and GLPRA.

'This is an enthralling book that has emerged from a dialogue between three classmates from Budapest who became psychoanalysts in three different cultures. In addition to being drawn into the personal journeys of each of the three women, the book also reflects developments in contemporary psychoanalysis that are at once diverse and overlapping. The three essays address the role of the tragic history of the Hungarian Shoah in the formation of the writers' identities, their struggles to come to terms with the traumatic past of their families and their process of mourning. The essays illuminate the psychoanalytic identity of each, revealed in their theoretical and clinical approaches. This is a remarkable contribution to the field and is likely to be of interest to clinicians and the general public alike.' - Anne Patterson is the editor of the New Library of Psychoanalysis book series, Routledge.

'Budapest, along with Vienna and Berlin, was a centre of psychoanalysis from 1900 until the Second World War, when many psychoanalysts managed to escape to Britain, America and France. These are the countries where the three authors of this book - all second-generation survivors of the Shoah in Hungary - practice today. Nearly half a million Hungarian Jews were sent to be murdered in Auschwitz, and antisemitism has continued to mark the recent history of Hungary. The authors, who met as students in grammar school in Budapest, all went on to become psychoanalysts. This deeply moving book is a celebration of their capactiy to survive intergenerational trauma and migration and of the role that psychoanalysis has played in their blossoming.' - Rosine Perelberg is the president of the British Psychoanalytical Society; she has published Psychic Bisexuality: A British-French Dialogue; Murdered Father, Dead Father: Revisiting the Oedipus Complex; Sexuality, Excess, and Representation; and the podcast 'The Shoah and Contemporary Antisemitism' for the International Psychoanalytic Association.

'It is not often that we have the opportunity to see how theory emerges from lived experience, but this is what this book offers. Three women have gathered here to tell us about the confluence of their personal and psychoanalytic journeys from post-WWII Hungary to the West; stories that are then reflected upon by two other women psychoanalysts. These are stories of hope and action, of potential and the ability to realize it, but also of deep awareness of the burdens of history and of the political and social forces that drive our lives through it. Ultimately, this is a book about the power of ideas, and of making sense of life's overwhelming riddles together to keep us going. A Deep reading, and psychoanalytic adventure.' - Eyal Rozmarin is a co-editor of the book series Relational Perspectives in Psychoanalysis, and an associate editor of the journals Psychoanalytic Dialogues and Studies in Gender and Sexuality