“Every psychologist should tend to with their own state of mind”

In the second lecture of the KEMKI Free University, Zsolt K. Horváth (social historian, METU) will present the rhetoric of citizens’ and agents’ reports between 1948 and 1975 based on two psychological case studies.

The quotation in the title comes from a woman psychologist who was herself a patient at the Hungarian National Institute of Psychiatry and Neurology from 1928 with “paranoid schizophrenia”. While working on a book about the typical psychological profile of the Hungarian worker, the psychologist became one of the most diligent denouncers of the 1950s. She wrote letters of denunciation to virtually every party and state authority about well-known figures in Hungarian psychology, including Ferenc Mérei. According to Hermann Rorschach, schizophrenia is like a series of earthquakes: we can see the extent of the destruction on the surface, but the geological origins of the earthquake remain hidden from witnesses. However, this is a metaphor not only of the patient’s psychiatric condition, but also of the socio-political conditions that emerge in the wake of her reports: in 1950, Mérei was stripped of all his positions and the psychologist who had pressed charges against him was sent to the Lipót Field.

Convicted for rearguard actions during the 1956 revolution, following his release, Mérei was surrounded by a horde of state security agents. Psychologists and psychiatrists, including Dénes Goldschmidt, alias informant “Hegyi”, a close colleague of Mérei’s, also filed reports on him. Worked as chief physician at the Institute for Psychiatric Rehabilitation in Intapuszta, Goldschmidt had introduced numerous innovative methods of social psychiatry, and as he noted, “I am convinced that spontaneous social activity is much more curative than a similar activity planned by doctors or medical staff, and that the fellow patient has greater competence.” Taking these two case studies as a point of departure, the presentation will explore the question of how the social networks of people were exploited and used by the Ministry of Interior to obtain information, and the specific role and responsibility of those who, through their corrective and curative work, knew much more about the hidden networks of communities and the workings of the human psyche.

From spring to autumn 2022, KEMKI will organise a six-part series of open lectures on the history of the Bródy Adél Children’s Hospital.