From Budapest to Psychoanalysis: Three Portraits and their Analytic Frames

This book follows the personal and professional journeys of three Jewish women from Budapest, originally classmates in the same high school. The book shows how they and their families were marked by the Shoah, and explores the impact of the social, cultural, and political milieu in which they travelled upon their development as psychoanalysts.

Following an introduction by the Hungarian psychoanalyst, Judit Mészáros, who gives a broad historical review of Hungarian Jewry during the Shoah and the Soviet era, the three authors provide autobiographical accounts of their own psychoanalytic evolution and interconnectedness. They describe their motivations for emigrating from Hungary, their early struggles to fit in, and their eventual acculturation. The authors explore their coming of age as clinicians in their adopted homelands and explain how their theoretical orientation and clinical styles were shaped by their respective analytic environments, their training experiences, and their own personal histories. They offer clinical vignettes to illustrate their respective psychoanalytic perspective. The book closes with an afterword from American psychoanalyst, Adrienne Harris, who contemplates the authors’ immigration experiences alongside her own.

Replete with personal, cultural, and political history, this book will prove both informative and fascinating for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists as well as the general public.