HUNGARY AFTER GLASNOST
189
never knows when the axe will fall. The spirit is there , but every–
body knows that the power is on the other side, not where the spirit
and where the enthusiasm are.
Milton Kapit:
I'm curious about what goes on in the minds of both the
analyst and the patient. Do they ignore the realistic situation?
Judith Sdkacs:
I don't know if this answers your question, but I
remember two distinct situations during the past five years when I
thought that doing real analytic work was impossible, and what I
was doing was much closer to crisis intervention than anything else .
One was in the weeks after Chernobyl, and the other was when the
new taxation system was about to start: it was announced well in ad–
vance , and it meant that the standard of living would decrease by
at least twenty percent, which is enormous . You know what that
means. It was a very heavy taxation which never before had existed
in Hungary , and people who were in enterprises had to work at lots
of things because they felt their existence threatened. In Hungary,
where big enterprises don't really exist, you have to think on a small
scale . The intelligentsia and everyone else was affected . There was
massive fear. So there are some periods when you feel you are in the
middle of a great change.
Milton Kapit:
What is the effect on psychoanalytic treatment?
Judith Sdkdcs:
You have to deal with superficial situations as well .
That's why it is crisis intervention . The fears the patient has pre–
sented are not only coming from his unconscious, but there is a very
decisive element of reality that you have to deal with . How someone
deals with reality is a psychological problem, and it concerns psychic
reality as well . I don't say, "Don't worry , you will survive." But it
changes the whole atmosphere.
Ivan Lust:
In that situation, those of my patients who had enough
strength were looking for more part-time jobs to pay the analytic
fees .
Milton Kapit:
One journalist recently commented that even though
the society may be dictatorial, what the analyst does is try to obtain
an inner view of the patient. I wonder whether that's really a possi–
bility, considering the authoritarian nature of Eastern society, of
Communist society.
Gyorgy
Hidas:
I think that in my paper on factors allowing for the sur–
vival of psychoanalysis in Hungary, I didn't elaborate on the impor–
tance of psychoanalysis itself. But one does have the possibility with
the help of psychoanalysis to enhance self-knowledge, to master
one's own psychic reality, and in this way to become a bit more inde-
