EDITH KURZWEIL
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ment.
(The Clinical Diary of Sandor Ferenczi,
which has recently been
published by Harvard University Press, corroborates her thesis.)
Ivan Lust spoke of the conflict in treating patients by means of
Freud's fatherly "technique of reason" versus Ferenczi's motherly
"technique of emotion." And he reported on two of his patients
whose stubbornly recurring fantasies he had managed to penetrate
by focusing on gestures, postures, and intonations - as Ferenczi
would have done. In the process, he developed a strong counter–
transference which, in tum, helped him redirect a part of the analy–
sis, and to create a new analytic framework.
When Gabor Szonyi found out he was coming to America, he
assumed we all would want to know more about Hungarian psycho–
analysts' feelings of professional identity in comparison to their col–
leagues in the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA).
When he analyzed the questionnaires he had used to research this
comparison (two-thirds of all analysts polled responded), he found
that before 1945, and again between then and 1948 (due to an up–
swing), professional and personal self-esteem had been above aver–
age; that between 1948 and 1956 (during persecution) it had been
exceedingly low; that between 1956 and 1975 (the time of secret
training and efforts toward IPA acceptance) it had sunk even lower;
and that official IPA recognition by 1980, and institutionalization by
1985, had not appreciably lifted the Hungarian analysts' self-esteem.
Clearly, their professional lives were closely linked not only to
specific political events but to their location within Hungarian
medicine, itself closely controlled by the government.
Szonyi had touched on the presence of Big Brother. Conse–
quently, many of the questions by the American panelists and by the
audience centered on psychoanalytic practice in a restrictive en–
vironment. Ethel Person, the Director of CUCPT&R, wondered
why Szonyi had not separated the period under the Nazis, why he
had underplayed it. And how, she asked of Roy Schafer (CUCPT&
R) do you handle transference and countertransference in a situa–
tion where persecutory aspects of governmental and other conditions
might be invoked by the analysand by means of accusations? Does
such a situation lead you to proceed somewhat too cautiously? Ildik6
MoMcsi, a psychoanalyst and 1956 emigre, responded by describ–
ing the dilemma of a hospital patient she had had in Hungary, a
worker who was under so much pressure at his job, and who har–
bored so much hatred, that he suffered from psychosomatic symp–
toms but was afraid to talk. Paul Ornstein, a former Hungarian and
