PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE MIGRATION OF CENTRAL AND EAST EUROPEAN

INTELLECTUALSFerenc Erős

„Pyschoanalysis and Politics”, Barcelona, 20-22 March, 2015.

• “Before 1914 the earth had belonged to all. People went where they wished and stayed as long as they pleased. There were no permits, no visas…. before 1914 I travelled from Europe to India and to America without passport and without ever having seen one. One embarked and alighted without questioning or being questioned, one did not have to fill out a single one of the many papers which are required today. The frontiers which, with their customs officers, police and militia, have become wire barriers thanks to the pathological suspicion of everybody against everybody else, were nothing but symbolic lines which one crossed with as little thought as one crosses the Meridian of Greenwich.” Stefan Zweig: The World of Yesterday.

• “…they were, to a larger extent, even in the pre-Hitler world, outsiders in their own countries; the academic world of Central Europe had never admitted them... They had, as it were, experienced premature training in the psychological condition of being émigrés, and this must have stood them in good stead when they had to become émigrés in the full sense of the term.” Jahoda, Marie (1969): The Migration of Psychoanalysis. In: Donald Fleming, Bernard Bailyn (eds.) The Intellectual Migration, Europe and America 1930–1960. Cambridge, Mass.

•The exiles Hitler made were the greatest collection of transplanted intellect, talent, and scholarship the world has ever seen". Gay, Peter (1968): Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider. Harper and Row, New York and Evanston.

• “Some day somebody will write the true story of Jewish emigration from the Germany; and he will start a description of that Mr Cohn from Berlin who had always been a 150% German, a German super-patriot. In 1933 that Mr Cohn found refuge in Prague and very quickly became a convinced Czech patriot… Time went on and about 1937 the Czech government… began to expel their Jewish refugees, disregarding the fact that they feel so strongly as prospective Czech citizens. Our Mr Cohn then went to Vienna; to adjust himself there a definite Austrian patriotism was required. The German invasion forced Mr Cohn out of that country. He arrived in Paris at a bad moment and he never did receive a residence-permit. Having already acquired a great skill in wishful thinking, he refused to take mere administrative measures seriously, convinced that he would spend his future life in France. Therefore, he prepared his adjustment to the French nation by identifying himself with ‘our’ ancestor Vercingetorix. “ Arendt, Hannah (1943): We refugees. In: Marc Robinson (ed.): Altogether Elsewhere. Writers on Exile. Harcourt Brace and Company, London 1994-

Important works on intellectual migration

• Congdon, Lee (1991): Exile and Social Thought: Hungarian Intellectuals in Germany and Austria, 1919-1933. Princeton University Press, Princeton, N. J.

• Coser, Lewis A. (1984): Refugee Scholars in America: Their Impact and Their Experiences. Yale University Press, New Haven

• Fermi, Laura (1968): Illustrious Emigrants: the intellectual migration from Europe, 1930–41. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

• Fleming, Donald – Bailyn, Bernard (eds.(1969): The Intellectual Migration: Europe and America, 1930–1960. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.

• Frank Tibor (2009): Double Exile: Migration of Jewish-Hungarian Intellectuals through Germany to the United States, 1919–1945. Peter Lang, Oxford.

• Jay, Martin (1986): Permanent Exiles. Columbia University Press, New York.

• 300 distinguished emigrants, among them 13 professional analysts: Erik H. Erikson, Bruno Bettelheim, Erich Fromm, Karen Horney, Franz Alexander, Edward Bibring, Helene Deutsch, Otto Fenichel, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, Heinz Hartmann, Ernst Kris, Wilhelm Reich and Theodor Reik.

Fleming, Donald – Bailyn, Bernard (eds.(1969): The Intellectual Migration: Europe and America, 1930–1960.

• in the beginning of the 1980s the European trained analysts still dominated the American psychoanalytic scene. According a survey made among the cca. 700 members of the New York, Boston and San Francisco Psychoanalytic Societies, they named eight emigrants among the ten most significant psychoanalysts. The first four were those who got their training still in Vienna: Heinz Hartmann, Ernst Kris, Erik Erikson and Margaret Mahler.

• Coser, Lewis A. (1984): Refugee Scholars in America: Their Impact and Their Experiences. ale University Press, New Haven

• “… we don’t want to be refugees, since don’t want to be Jews; we pretend to be English-speaking people, since German-speaking immigrants of recent years are marked as Jews; we don’t call ourselves stateless, since the majority of stateless people are Jews; we are willing to become loyal Hottentots, only to hide the fact that we are Jews. We don’t succeed and we can’t succeed; under the cover of our ’optimism’ you can easily detect the hopeless sadness of assimilationism.” Arendt, Hannah (1943): We refugees. In: Marc Robinson (ed.): Altogether Elsewhere. Writers on Exile. Harcourt Brace and Company, London 1994

Works on persecution and rescue

• Brecht, Karen; Friedrich, Volker; Hermanns, Ludger M.; Kaminer, Isidor J.; Juelich, Dierk H. (Hg.) (1985): „Hier geht das Leben auf eine sehr merkwürdige Weise weiter ...”: Zur Geschichte der Psychoanalyse in Deutschland. Edition Michael Kellner, Hamburg.

• Cocks, George C. (1985): Psychoanalysis in the Third Reich: The Göring Institute. Oxford University Press, New York.

• Goggin, James E. – Brockman-Goggin, Eilen (2001): Death of a „Jewish Science“. Psychanalysis and the Third Reich. Purdue University Press, Indiana.

• Steiner, Riccardo (2000): „It is a New Kind of Diaspora“: Explorations in the Sociopolitical and Cultural Context of Psychoanalysis. Karnac, London

Membership list of the Hungarian Psychoanalytic Society, 31. Dec. 1918

• Gegenwärtige Mitgliederliste (31. Dezember 1918):• M. Dick, Budapest, VII. Erzsébet-kőrút 14.• Dr. M. Eisner, Szeged, Dugonics-tér 11.• Dr. A. Fazekas, Budapest, IX. Üllöi-ut 89.• Dr. B. von Felszeghy, Budapest, Ministerpräsidium (Nemzeti palota).• Dr. S. Ferenczi, Budapest, VII. Erzsébet-kőrút 45 (Vorsitzender).• Dr. A. Freund von Tószeg, Budapest, VI. Liszt Ferencz-tér 6.• Dr. J. Hárnik, Budapest, VIII. Rákóczi-tér 13.• Dr. I. Hollós, Chefarzt der staatl. Irrenanstalt Nagyszeben, Budapest, Nagykoronautca• 16.• H. Ignotus-Veigelsberg, Budapest, II. Margit-kőrút 64/a.• Dr. M. Jellinek, Budapest, II. Csalogány-utca 50.• Prof. Dr. E. Jones, London (Ehrenmitglied).• Dr. L. Lévy, Budapest, V. Szalay-utca 3.• Dr. S. Pfeifer, Budapest, I. Nyárs-utca 3.• Dr. A. Radó, Budapest, IX. Ferencz-kőrút 14 (Sekretär).• Frau Dr. E. Révész, Budapest, VIII. Vas-utca 15/b.• Dr. G. Róheim, Budapest, VI. Hermina-ut 36/a.• Dr. G. Szilágyi, Budapest, VII. Damjanich-utca 28.• Prof. Dr. J. Varga, Budapest, VIII. Sándor-tér 4.• Dr. A. Varjas, Budapest, I. Gellérthegy-utca 45.• Vorsitzender: Dr. Ferenczi.• Sekretär: Dr. Radó.• Es wurden seit Mai 1918 folgende wissenschaftliche

Varjas’ Soviet trade union membership card, 1927 (Archives of Political History, Budapest)

Letter of the Hungarian Psychoanalytic Society to the Swedish Legation, 1944

Biographical Note •Otto Fleischmann was born in 1896. A medical doctor, he was taught psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud in Vienna where he was associated with other psychoanalysts including Anna Freud. After the German Nazi takeover of Austria, Fleischmann went to Budapest, Hungary. In 1944, with the German occupation of Hungary, he received protection from the Swedish Foreign Ministry through diplomatic cover provided by Raoul Wallenberg. Fleischmann subsequently worked with Wallenberg in his efforts to save Jews in Hungary, 1944-1945. After the war, he returned to Vienna to work with psychoanalyst August Aichhorn. By 1951, Fleischmann had joined the Menninger Foundation in Topeka, Kansas. He died in 1963. Otto Fleischmann papers. Library of Congress, Washington DC.

Wallenberg and Fleischmann

• In the context of the inexorable decline of the nation-state and the general corrosion of traditional legal-political categories, the refugee is perhaps the only imaginable figure of the people in our day. At least until the process of the dissolution of the nation-state and its sovereignty has come to an end, the refugee is the sole category in which it is possible today to perceive the forms and limits of a political community to come, in the context of the inexorable decline of the nation-state and the general corrosion of traditional legal-political categories, the refugee is perhaps the only imaginable figure of the people in our day. At least until the process of the dissolution of the nation-state and its sovereignty has come to an end, the refugee is the sole category in which it is possible today to perceive the forms and limits of a political community to come.” Agamben, Giorgio (1995): „We Refugees”. Symposium, 49(2): 114–119