ISE BALASz.RAKOCZY
Psychoanalytic Diaries
Introduction
During the period between the wars, the center of psychoanalysis - its
true heart - shifted from Vienna to Budapest. There, Sandor Ferenczi,
Freud's sometime disciple, became its undisputed leader. In the years
before he died this brave, inventive man risked a bold experiment. To
counter the effects of his hidden weakness, and also to reveal it, he
sometimes put himself on the couch and the patient in his own, upright
chair. By this means he hoped to avert a common and crippling
misbelief: that a person's failure to be loved in childhood arose from his
own, and not his parents', limitations.
Some of the analysands he'd treated in this way went on to establish
practices of their own, and some of theirs went on to do the same, so
that there developed in that city a culture of irregularly trained practi–
tioners, working by a variety of unorthodox means. Among them was
my grandmother's dear friend , Ise.
At the same time that Ise began her work (around 1935) she also
began to keep a journal.
It
was with this precious journal, and aided by
her jewels, that she fled from Hungary in 1944 after it was overrun by
German troops. Ise came from an ancient family, of which several ances–
tors had made investments abroad through banks in ZUrich and Chicago .
One of them had even acquired a sheep ranch in Montana - thousands of
acres of land- very beautiful and untamed but wild.
It
was there that Ise
came to settle.
Twelve years afterward she sent my grandmother a packet containing
the journals and with them a letter, which I shall later give in full. In it
she wrote, "After a lifetime of living in the past, I am finally and fully in
the present. For years this journal has been my chief companion. Now
that endless self-communion weighs me down."
After my grandmother's death, Ise's papers came into my hands. (She
had long since died and I, coincidentally, had become an analyst too.)
Immediately I recognized their value. Not only for capturing a certain
moment in the history of this field , but also for revealing a remarkable
quality of mind. That mind is inseparable from her birthright. In posses–
sion of his name, which alone confers value, the aristocrat is free to pur–
sue his desire. It is her long-delayed grasp upon that freedom which
