Psychoanalytikerinnen. Biografisches Lexikon

Renée Amár (1893-?)

Renée Amár was born into a Jewish family in Budapest, her parents were Michael D. Amár and Regina Strakosch. In 1916 she qualified in medicine at the University of Budapest and subsequently specialized as a neurologist and psychiatrist. Renée Amár worked as a doctor in the Schwartzer Sanatorium (since 1921: Siesta Sanatorium), a private mental hospital in the Buda Hills. She underwent training analysis with Michael Balint and became a member of the Hungarian Psychoanalytical Society [Magyarországi Pszichoanalitikai Egyesület (MPE)] in 1939. Later she was appointed a training analyst of the MPE. In the 1920s and 1930s she was also a member of the Hungarian Association of Individual Psychology and the Hungarian Graphological Association.
Renée Amar survived the Holocaust and stayed a member of the MPE until its dissolution in 1949. Like other Hungarian psychoanalysts, she occupied influential healthcare positions in the post-war period. For example, there were seven psychoanalysts elected to various posts within the newly founded Association for Mental Health Protection (LESZ) [Lelki Egészségvédelmi Szövetség], including István Hollós as vice-president and Renée Amar in the propaganda committee. However, all activities of the LESZ were suppressed by the Communist Party. In 1947, Renée Amar served as a deputy chief physician at the National Social Insurance Institute OTI [Országos Társadalombiztosító Intézet], which was liquidated in 1950. (Top of the article)

Alice Balint née Székely-Kovács (1898-1939)

Alice Székely-Kovács was born in Budapest, the eldest daughter of the Hungarian psychoanalyst Vilma Kovács and her first husband, Zsigmond Szekely. Her sister, the artist Olga Székely-Kovács, became especially known by her caricatures of psychoanalysts. When her mother divorced Székely and married the architect Frédéric Kovács, Alice and her two siblings remained with their father who entrusted them to a half-mad servant. After a separation of several years, they joined their mother in about 1910 and were later adopted by Frédéric Kovács.
Alice Székely-Kovács studied mathematics and anthropology in Budapest and became a disciple of the ethno-psychoanalyst Géza Róheim. Her fellow student was the brother of her classmate Emmi, Michael Balint (1896-1970), who studied medicine at the University of Budapest. In 1921 Alice and Michael Balint were married and moved to Berlin to train at the Psychoanalytic Institute. They both began their training analysis with Hanns Sachs. Alice Balint became an associate member of the Berliner Psychoanalytische Vereinigung in 1923. A year later Alice and Michael Balint returned to Budapest and completed their training with Sándor Ferenczi. In 1926 Alice Balint became a member of the Hungarian Psychoanalytical Society [Magyar Pszichoanalitikus Egyesület (MPE)] and was shortly afterwards elected to its Training Committee. Alice Balint was the leading child analyst in Hungary during the 1920s and 1930s.
In 1939, after anti-Jewish legislation had been passed in Hungary, the Balints emigrated with their son John to Great Britain and established themselves in Manchester. In the same year they were admitted to the British Psycho-Analytical Society. Alice Balint participated in establishing a psychoanalytical society in Manchester, but three months after their arrival in Great Britain, she died suddenly of a ruptured aneurysm.
Alice Balint dealt mainly with pedagogical issues and a theory of education. She was also interested in psychoanalytic ethnography, using ethnological studies to draw a parallel between a child's psychological development and the psychology of so-called primitive peoples. Her book The Psychoanalysis of the Nursery (published in Hungary in 1931) was a pioneering work rich with examples about the impact of drive objects on the mental development of the child. Alice Balint relativised the educational goals of the society, however approved authority in the education of children, but as less frustrating as possible. Alice and Michael Balint contributed a great deal to the establishment of theories on the early development of object relations. In her essay Love for the mother and mother-love Alice Balint described the archaic relationship between mother and child as a primary object-love without a sense of reality, from which develops, under the influence of reality, the real capacity of loving in the social sense. A collection of Alice Balint's papers entitled Anya és gyermek [Mother and Child] was published posthumously in 1941. A complete edition of her writings appeared in the French journal Le Coq-Héron in 1997 and 1998. (Top of the article)

Charlotte Balkányi (1913-1992)

The child analyst Sári (later Charlotte) Balkányi was born in Budapest as the second of four daughters of Kálmán Balkányi and Edit Veszi. Her father, a renowned Hungarian-Jewish attorney and author of economics, was a director of the National Hungarian Commerce Association OMKE. In 1932 Sári Balkányi married the physician János Pogány, who died the following year. In 1933 she enrolled at the Budapest Training College for Teachers of Handicapped Children and obtained a diploma as a speech therapist in 1937. From 1937 to 1946 she worked as a teacher at the Israelite Deaf and Mute National Institute in Budapest.
In 1935 she began a training analysis with Endre Almásy, the later president of the Hungarian Psychoanalytical Society [Magyar Pszichoanalitikus Egyesület (MPE)]. She completed her analysis in 1941 and became a member of the MPE in 1948, just before it ceased to exist. In her membership paper she described the case of a patient who was deported to Bergen-Belsen, survived the concentration camp and continued the treatment after the war. The study was published in 1961 under the title Psycho-analysis of a stammering girl.
In the post-war period Charlotte Balkányi worked as a child analyst in Budapest. Unlike many of her Hungarian colleagues, she did not join the ruling Communist Party. Temporarily she belonged to the circle around Leopold Szondi, the founder of Fate Analysis. In 1955 she emigrated to Great Britain and became a member of the British Psychoanalytical Society. Practising as a child analyst and speech therapist in London, Charlotte Balkányi was especially interested in the theory of language and published several papers on this subject. Departing from Sigmund Freud's distinction between thing- and word-presentations and in pursuance of certain psycholinguistic theses, she developped her concept of verbalization. She showed that syntax and affects both originate from the infantile relation to the primary object. This relationship enables split-off affects to become conscious through verbalization.
Charlotte Balkányi died from gastric cancer at the age of seventy-nine. (Top of the article)

Ágnes Binét (1920-1991)

The Hungarian psychologist and psychoanalyst Ágnes Binét was born into a Jewish family in Budapest. She studied psychology with Jean Piaget in Geneva and graduated in 1945 at the Péter Pázmány University in Budapest. After the war, from 1945 to 1948, she studied humanities and then worked (like Livia Nemes) at the National Institute of Educational Psychology [Országos Neveléstudományi Intézet], headed by Ferenc Mérei, a pupil of Leopold Szondi. In 1950 the institute was liquidated, Mérei was discharged from his position. Ágnes Binét married in 1950 the mathematician Tamás Varga (1919-1987), with whom she had two children.
After the communist takeover in 1949, psychology and psychoanalysis in Hungary were condemned as bourgeois ideologies. The Hungarian Psychoanalytical Society [Magyar Pszichoanalitikus Egyesület (MPE)] was dissolved, but continued to work privately in a small circle around Imre Hermann. During this time, Ágnes Binét received her psychoanalytic training with Imre Hermann.
In the 1960s Ágnes Binét taught child psychology at the Institute of Psychology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA). Starting in 1969, she worked at Gyermekpszichológiai Rendelő, the Budapest Child Psychotherapy Ambulatory Clinic founded by Júlia György, until she retired in 1980. After her retirement she practised as a psychoanalyst until the end of her life. She was a training analyst and a member of the Education committee of the MPE, which became a provisional member society of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) in 1983.
Ágnes Binét was particularly influenced by Imre Hermann's work. In her study Comportement d'attachement ou instinct de cramponnement? (1977) she discussed Hermann's conception of the origins of the mother-child relationship, comparing his theory of the instincts of clinging to John Bowlby's attachment theory. (Top of the article)

Aranka Böhm (1893-1944)

Aranka Böhm was born in Ipolyság (then Austria-Hungary), the daughter of Ignác Böhm, a Jewish merchant, and his wife Hermina Mangold. In 1914 she married the physician Tivadar Kertész (1889-1979), who later became the husband of Lillian Rotter. From this marriage she had a son, Tamás Kertész. In 1913 Aranka Böhm began to study psychoanalytically oriented medicine at the Royal Hungarian University in Budapest, but gave up her study after the first examination in 1918. In 1920 she separated from Kertész and married the famous Hungarian writer, Frigyes Karinthy (1887-1938). Their son Ferenc Karinthy was born in 1921; he also became a writer. Aranka Böhm was a celebrated beauty in the artists' circle of Budapest. Her chaotic and unhappy marriage with Karinthy lasted until he died from a stroke in 1938.
In 1930 Aranka Böhm continued her medical studies, graduating in 1932 (MD). After her residency at the Budapest Clinic of Psychiatry and Neurology, she worked at the psychiatric Balassa Utcai Clinic and treated private clients. She received her psychoanalytic training in Budapest and Vienna, where in 1936 she worked at the University Clinic for Neurology and Psychiatry directed by Otto Pötzl. It is not sure whether and with whom she completed her analysis.
The occupation of Hungary by German forces in 1944 struck her working at a psychiatric hospital in Zalaegerszeg. In summer 1944 Aranka Böhm was deported to Auschwitz, where she was murdered. (Top of the article)

Margit Dubovitz née Garami (1888-1977)

Margit Dubovitz (or Dubowitz), one of the first child analysts in Hungary, was born in Budapest as the daughter of Jewish Czech immigrants. Her father Ede Grünbaum was baptized in 1881 and changed his name to Garami. He ran a coffee house in Budapest until his bankruptcy, and when he died in 1892, he left his wife and four children in poverty. Her elder brother Ernö Garami was a well-known Hungarian social-democrat politician.
Margit Garami completed a commercial apprenticeship and worked in an office. In 1909 she was married to Hugo Dubovitz, a chemical engineer, with whom she had two sons. After the death of her eight-year-old son Imre in 1918, her marriage collapsed. Margit Dubovitz began a love affair with Anton von Freund, a patient of Sigmund Freud and a patron of the psychoanalytic movement. In 1918 she went into analysis with Sándor Ferenczi, who had treated her with hypnosis when she was a girl. Hugo Dubovitz was also analysed by Ferenczi. From 1919 to 1920 Margit Dubovitz continued her analysis with Sigmund Freud in Vienna.
In 1921 she enrolled at the Medical School of the Elisabeth University of Pécs, where she graduated in 1927. She became a full member of the Hungarian Psychoanalytical Society [Magyar Pszichoanalitikus Egyesület (MPE)] in 1929. In the following years she presented several of her cases to the Society. In 1930 Ferenczi entrusted her with the direction of a psychoanalytic outpatient clinic for children in Budapest under the auspices of the Hungarian League for the Protection of Children. After its closure in 1931, she directed the educational counselling of the psychoanalytic polyclinic of the MPE.
From 1935 onwards, Margit Dubovitz conducted regularly her child analytic seminar at the Budapest Psychoanalytic Institute. In 1936 she and her colleague Katá Levy attended the child analytic seminar of Anna Freud in Vienna. Anna Freud noted in her book The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence that she was indebted to Margit Dubovitz for the suggestion that the tendency of adolescents to brood on the meaning of life and death reflects the destructive activities in their own psyche.
Margit Dubovitz survived the fascist terror in Hungary. After the war she worked with orphans in kindergartens. Since 1949 she was employed with the National Social Insurance Institute. (Top of the article)

Ilona Felszeghy (1892-1988)

Jóba Ilona Felszeghy was born in Nyíregyháza in the northeast of Hungary. She was trained by Sándor Ferenczi, Michael Balint and Imre Hermann and specialized in child analysis. In 1930 she started working at the psychoanalytic out-patient clinic for children in Budapest, which was headed by Margit Dubovitz. Together with Margit Dubovitz she presented as a guest of the Hungarian Psychoanalytical Society [Magyar Pszichoanalitikus Egyesület (MPE)] several case reports from the children's out-patient clinic in 1930. In 1938 she reported her analysis of a six-year-old girl.
Ilona Felszeghy was married to Béla Felszeghy (1882-1951), doctor of laws and a member of the MPE between 1919 and 1927. She survived the war and the German occupation in Budapest. In 1944 she managed to rescue what remained of Ferenczi's papers from the ruins of his house in Buda and sent it to Michael Balint in London.
In 1946 she became an associate member of the MPE, where she was one of the non-Jewish psychoanalysts. Her supervisor was Kata Lévy. She read introductory lectures for pedagogues and participated in the post-graduate training of teachers of elementary and secondary schools. After the dissolution of the MPE in 1949, when psychoanalysis was banned as a bourgeois ideology, Ilona Felszeghy continued to practice psychoanalysis privately during the 1950s. In the 1960s, she travelled frequently to London to visit her emigrated Hungarian colleagues. She was elected direct member of the IPA at the 25th International Psycho-Analytical Congress 1967 in Copenhagen. (Top of the article)

Edith Gyömröi (1896-1987)

Edith Gyömröi was born in Budapest as one of three daughters of Hofrat Márk Gelb and his wife Ilona Pfeifer. Her father was a wealthy furniture manufacturer who magyarised his name to András Gyömröi in 1899. The family later converted from Judaism to Catholicism. Through her uncle István Hollós, a founder of the Psychoanalytical Society at Budapest, Edith Gyömröi began to learn about psychoanalysis as early as the 1910s.
From 1911 to 1914 she attended a school of applied arts in order to become an interior designer. But then she married the chemical engineer Ervin Rényi and moved with him to Vienna. They divorced in 1918, shortly after the birth of their son, Gábor. Edith Gyömröi returned to Budapest, where she became active in left-wing intellectual and artistic circles and was a contributor to the avant-garde journal Ma. During the Hungarian Soviet Republic she worked temporarily for the People's Commissariat for Education.
After the fall of Hungary's Commune in 1919, she emigrated first to Vienna and then via Romania to Berlin, where she arrived in 1923. She now was married to Lászlo Glück (later Tölgy), who was active as a foreign trade council of the Soviet Union. She divorced her second husband in the late 1920s. From 1924 to 1929 Edith Glück carried out various activities in Berlin. She was a costume designer at the Neumann Produktion film studio, she was also involved in translating, interpreting and photography, and she worked on the staff of the Communist newspaper Rote Hilfe for a time.
During this time she commenced psychotherapy with Otto Fenichel who became her training analyst between 1925 and 1929. Although the leading German psychoanalysts, Max Eitington and Felix Boehm, rejected her candidacy because of her political views, she was eventually admitted to the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute. Together with Annie Reich, Edith Jacobssohn, Barbara Lantos, Käthe Misch and Siegfried Bernfeld, she belonged to the group of Freudomarxists around Otto Fenichel. Edith Gyömröi completed her training in 1932 and a year later became an associate member of the Deutsche Psychoanalytische Gesellschaft.
When Hitler came to power in 1933, she was forced to emigrate again. This time she went to Prague, where she participated in the foundation of the Prague Psychoanalytic Study Group. She returned to Budapest in 1934 and became an associate member of the Hungarian Psychoanalytical Society. She held seminars for mothers and educators on practical educational issues and gave lectures about sexual problems in childhood and marriage. In 1935 she took over the treatment of Hungarian national poet Attila József, whose condition worsened during analysis. He started to pursue Gyömroi first with his love, then aggressive threatening after she had rejected him. When he finally committed suicide, some blame this on Gyömröi.
After the "Anschluss" of Austria into the German Reich in 1938, Edith Gyömröi emigrated via Trieste to Ceylon, together with her third husband, journalist László Újvári (1900-1940). Suffering from leukaemia, Újvári died in 1940. In 1941 she married Evelyn Frederick Charles (Lyn) Ludowyk (1906-1985), Professor of English at the University of Colombo. Edith Ludowyk-Gyömröi studied religious history in Colombo and wrote a doctoral dissertation in 1944 entitled Miracle and Faith in Early Buddhism. She was the only psychoanalyst practising in Ceylon and a training- and control-analyst of the Indian Psychoanalytical Society in Calcutta until 1956. It was during this time that she wrote Pubertätsriten der Mädchen, an ethno-psychoanalytic study about girls' adolescent rituals in a transitional society.
In 1956 Gyömroi and her husband moved to London, where she became a member of the British Psychoanalytical Society and practised as an analyst until she was 80. She joined the staff of Anna Freud's Hampstead Clinic, working there as a training- and control analyst. One of her training analysands was Anne-Marie Sandler. Probably best known among her published studies was The analysis of a young concentration camp victim (1963), a case study about a Jewish woman, who had survived Auschwitz in a group of children and suffered from identity disorders in her adolescence. Edith Gyömröi also wrote poems, short stories and novels. (Top of the article)

Lilly Hajdu (1891-1960)

Born in Miskolc, Hungary, Lilly Hajdu grew up in an assimilated Jewish family as one of five siblings. Her father Mihály Hajdu was a commercial employee. She enrolled in the medical university in Budapest in 1909. Like her elder sister Margit, she belonged to the first generation of women physicians in Hungary. During the 1910s she was a member of the left-wing Galilei Circle founded by her brother-in-law, Zsigmond Kende. Her future husband, the Jewish paediatrician Miklós Gimes (1889-1944), was also part of this circle. At the beginning of World War I, she graduated with a degree in medicine and worked as an assistant physician at the Moravcsik Psychiatric Hospital in Budapest. In 1915 she married Miklós Gimes; their son Miklós was born in 1917, their daughter Judit (Juca) in 1920.
In 1919, during the Hungarian Soviet Republic, Lilly Hajdu worked at the Ministry of Public Healthcare. She and her husband were committed to the fight against endemic diseases. After the fall of the Hungary's Commune and the adoption of anti-Semitic laws by the Horthy regime, Lilly Hajdu Gimes and her husband were baptised and joined the Unitarian church. From 1921 onwards she directed the Budapest Frimm Institute, a facility for the care of mentally handicapped children. Here she developed her own institute called Dr. Lilly G. Hajdu's Children's Camp and Institute for Therapeutic Education, opening in 1927, where she continued working with mentally handicapped children until 1933.
During the 1920s Lilly Hajdu trained as a psychoanalyst and underwent training analysis with Vilma Kovács. Her theoretical technical teacher was Sándor Ferenczi. In 1933 she became a member of the Hungarian Psychoanalytical Society. She established her own psychoanalytic practice in Budapest and lectured at the Psychoanalytic Institute. After the first anti-Jewish laws were passed in 1938, the Hungarian analysts were forced to hold their seminars in private homes. In 1944 Miklós Gimes was deported by the fascist Arrow Crossers and died of typhus at the Leitmeritz concentration camp. Lilly Hajdu survived this time thanks to a Swedish "Schutzpass".
After the war, similarly to many colleagues, Lilly Hajdu joined the ruling Communist Party. In 1947 she was appointed advisor to the State Health Insurance Scheme by the Ministry of Justice. She participated in the rebuilding of the Hungarian Psychoanalytical Society and was president of the society from 1947 until its dissolution in 1949. Although the communist state rejected Freud's thinking as a subversive ideology, Lilly Hajdu publicly defended psychoanalysis, declaring it compatible with the obligatory Pavlovian doctrines of Soviet psychology.
In the early 1950s, she started working at the National Institute of Neurology and Psychiatry (Lipótmezö) in Budapest and served as its director between 1954 and 1957. As the national supervisor of the psychiatric system, she fought against straitjackets and shock therapy, promoting the treatment with medication and work therapy - psychoanalytic therapy was not admitted.
After the failure of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising, Hajdu's son, the journalist Miklós Gimes jr, was accused in the show trial against Imre Nagy and his supporters. He was sentenced to death and executed in 1958. A year before Lilly Haidu was forced to retire. She tried to obtain a visa to join her daughter in Switzerland, but the Hungarian authorities denied her application. In May 1960 Lilly Hajdu committed suicide with an overdose of drugs.
Lilly Hajdu was an early proponent of combining individual analysis with family and group therapy. Her interest focussed on the origins and treatment of schizophrenia. She was one of the first to establish a causal link between the familiar psychodynamic processes and the development of schizophrenia. In her essay Contributions to the etiology of schizophrenia, published in 1940, she formulated the thesis that traumatic experiences of hunger in infancy could be a cause of schizophrenia. She underlined the role of two key factors for the development of schizophrenia: a cold and sadistic mother and a passive, indifferent father.
In her opinion, schizophrenia could be treated with the methods of psychoanalysis by taking account of Sándor Ferenczi's theoretical concepts. In one of her studies (1933) she summarised the dominant features in the psychoanalytic treatment of schizophrenia, based on Anna Freud's concept of an analogy between psychotic acting and children's play, and Ferenczi's ideas about the period of omnipotence by magic gestures. (Top of the article)

Fanny Hann-Kende (1891-1952)

Fanny Hann-Kende was born in Budapest, the daughter of Arnold Hann, a high-ranking financial officer, and Lujza Gold. Like Lilly Hajdu, she belonged to the first generation of women physicians in Hungary. She received her medical degree in 1914 from the Royal Hungarian University in Budapest, where she was an Assistant Professor in Pathology from 1914 to 1920. During the same time she was also chief pathologist in several Budapest hospitals. A diagnosis made by her in 1918 was known among experts as "Hann syndrome". She sympathised with left ideas and lost her university position after the fall of Hungary's Commune in 1919. In 1920 she married Béla Kende (1887-?), a noted Budapest physician of Jewish origin, with whom she had one daughter, Mária Lujza.
From 1927 to 1929 Fanny Hann-Kende received psychoanalytic and psychiatric training in Vienna. She underwent analysis with Helene Deutsch and worked at the Wagner-Jauregg Clinic for Psychiatry. Returning to Budapest, she became in 1930 a member of the Hungarian Psychoanalytical Society headed by Sándor Ferenczi. Between 1932 and 1938 she worked at the psychoanalytic policlinic in Budapest, lectured at the Budapest Psychoanalytical Institute, and was appointed as a training analyst in 1935. She developed a new method of abbreviated psychoanalytic therapy, which she described in her paper "Ein Versuch der Zeitersparnis in der psychoanalytischen Therapie" presented at the 1936 International Psychoanalytical Congress in Marienbad. In 1933 she was one of the first to suggest that the analyst's reactions could be used to advantage in psychoanalytic treatment.
In 1932 she gave a lecture on the developmental theory of female sexuality at the Budapest institute. A year later she published her article Über Klitorisonanie und Penisneid [About clitoris masturbation and penis envy]. Like Karen Horney in her essay The denial of the vagina (1933), Hann-Kende questioned Sigmund Freud's theory of the development of "normal femininity". Using examples from non-European cultures, she described societies, where penis envy was unknown, clitoris masturbation, however, widespread. According to her, these examples show that clitoris masturbation is not restricted to an early stage of development, as Freud thought, but is exercised simultaneously with vaginal masturbation.
Early in 1938, Fanny Hann-Kende came to the United States as a lecturer at the invitation of the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute (NYPSI), becoming a member in 1943 and a traning analyst in 1948. From 1948 until her death, she was an associate in psychiatry at Columbia University and an associate attending at the university's Psychoanalytic Clinic for Training and Research. At that time Ruth Easser was one of her training analysands.
Fanny Hann-Kende died of colon cancer shortly before her sixty-first birthday. (Top of the article)

Alice Hermann née Cziner (1895-1975)

The psychologist and psychoanalyst Alice Hermann was born in Abafalva in Hungary, the daughter of the farmer Béla Cziner and Stefánia Singer. From 1915 on she studied psychology, philosophy and aesthetics at the University of Budapest. In 1919 she began working as an intern in the university laboratory for experimental psychology of Géza Révész. Under his supervision, she graduated with a PhD in philosophy in 1921. In her doctoral thesis - partially published under the title Kísérleti vizsgálatok a megértés problémáihoz (1922) [Experimental Studies on the Problem of Understanding] - she examined the comprehension of words by using the introspection method of the Würzburg School. In 1922 she married Imre Hermann (1889-1984), who was an assistant of Révész and later a leader of the Budapest School of Psychoanalysis and a mediator between psychoanalysis and the psychology of thinking. The couple had three daughters.
During the 1920s Alice Hermann participated in her husband's psychological experiments, for example, on the formal characteristics of choice behaviour. In addition, she was appointed as director of the Budapest vocational guidance centre for apprentices. She became interested in the psychology of advertising and published A reklám lélektana (1927), one of the first Hungarian books about this topic. After qualifying as a teacher in 1929, she underwent psychoanalytic training in Berlin. She worked as a psychoanalyst from the mid-1930s until 1945, when she gave up her therapeutic practice. In her psychoanalytic study of Marie Bashkirtseff (1924), Alice Hermann-Cziner assumed that the artist's drawing ability was based on hand libido combined with the awareness of her bodily beauty.
After World War II Alice Hermann, along with her husband, joined the Communist Party. In the following thirty years she dedicated her knowledge to the education of preschool children. She collaborated with the Communist Rákosi government in the development of directives for education and child-psychology and served as an inspector for preschools to the Council of Budapest from 1949 to 1952. She was appointed educational advisor to the Hungarian Trade Union Federation, senior inspector of the preschools run by the Democratic Alliance of Hungarian Women (MNDSZ), and (between 1952 and 1956) teacher of kindergarten workers. From 1957 until her retirement in 1962, she was a senior advisor at the department of pedagogical training in the Ministry of Culture. Alice Hermann's main work Emberré nevelés [Making of Human Being], first published in 1946, was based on a series of lectures on educational psychology. (Top of the article)

Erzsébet Kardos (1902-1945)

Erzsébet Kardos was one of the most promising talents of the Budapest School of Psychoanalysis in the 1930s and 1940s. She was born into an assimilated Jewish merchant family in Győr (western Hungary), the eldest daughter of Jenő Kardos [Jakab Kohn] and Teréz Eislitzer. Due to the Numerus Clausus for women and Jews in Budapest, she commenced her medical education in 1921 at the University of Würzburg and then studied from 1924 to 1926 at the Elisabeth University in Pécs, where she obtained her medical degree in 1927.
Subsequently she worked for two years as an assistant at Arthur Schlossmann's Kinderklinik der Städtischen Krankenanstalt in Düsseldorf and also as chief consultant at the Auguste-Victoria-Haus Children's Home there. In 1929 she was invited to Colombia, where she worked as senior pediatrician in the private clinic of the Munich bacteriologist Maxim Bauer in Barranquilla. Back in Europe in 1932, she was initially employed at the Kaiser- und Kaiserin-Friedrich Children's Hospital in Berlin, before working for two years, from 1933, with Lipót (Leopold) Szondi, the founder of Fate Analysis. In Szondi's Pathological and Remedial Laboratory of the Hungarian Royal College of Special Education in Budapest she performed the examination of juvenile criminals and conducted therapy with mentally handicapped children.
In 1934 Erzsébet Kardos entered training analysis with Vilma Kovács. Two years after that she began to practice psychoanalysis in addition to her pediatric practice. In 1939 she became a member of the Hungarian Psychoanalytic Association, with a focus upon child analysis. A year later she married the Hungarian pediatrician and psychoanalyst Endre (Andrew) Petö (1904-1985). In their shared work attempting the metapsychological description of play, they pointed out that all the specifics of the primary process can be found in children's play. Kardos' contribution to this problem was published only in 1956 in the article Contributions to the theory of play.
Although they were granted a visa for immigration to Australia in 1939, Erzsébet Kardos and Endre Petö still lived in Budapest, when the German troops invaded Hungary in 1944. They were hiding separately with forged papers. However, shortly before the liberation of Budapest in January 1945, someone denounced Erzsébet Kardos and she was murdered by an Arrow Cross death squad. Andrew Petö emigrated to Australia in 1949 and then to the USA. (Top of the article)

Mária Kircz-Takács (1887-1973)

Mária (Marie) Takács was born into an intellectual Jewish family in Budapest. Her mother Anna Kirz was a teacher, her father Mór Takács a lawyer. She studied history at the University of Budapest and got a teaching diploma and a PhD in 1909. Her thesis was on the social conditions in Hungary in the years between 1830 and 1847. In 1909 she married her cousin, the lawyer Andor Kircz (1882-1915). Because of his weak health, the couple spent a few years in Egypt, where their son Gyula József Kircz was born in Cairo in 1911.
At the beginning of World War I, the family had to return to Budapest, where Andor Kircz died of tuberculosis in 1915. Since 1916 Mária Kircz-Takács taught at the State Gymnasium for Girls in Budapest. She was actively involved in the 1919 Hungarian Soviet Republic and worked for the People's Commissariat for Education, where she participated in realising a new teaching curriculum for history lessons. In 1920, under Horthy, she was accused of her activity in the Soviet Republic and lost her job. She earned her living by translation work and private language lessons and published reviews in the magazine Századunk. In 1925 she took up a position as a librarian at the Budapest Chamber of Commerce and Industry, and worked there until 1946.
In 1923, Marie Takács presented a paper about the Hungarian poet János Arany at the Hungarian Psychoanalytical Society [Magyar Pszichoanalitikus Egyesület (MPE)]. The same year she became an associate member, which she remained until 1946. Apart from literary and historical works, she translated Sigmund Freud's Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens [A mindennapi élet pszichopathologiája] and Erwin Wexberg's individual psychological book Das nevöse Kind [Az ideges gyermek] into Hungarian.
After the end of World War II, Mária Kircz-Takács decided to leave Hungary and settle in Holland, where her son Gyula and his family lived. In 1947 she found a free-lance job at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, where she worked on the classification of the Institute's collection of books until her retirement in 1966. (Top of the article)

Sára Klaniczay (1930-2017)

The Hungarian psychologist and psychoanalyst Sára Klaniczay graduated in mathematics and subsequently taught mathematics, physics and chemistry at the high school. While working as a teacher, she became interested in psychology. She studied psychology and earned a PhD in 1972 with a thesis on stuttering in early childhood. Like Ágnes Binét, Lívia Nemes and Teréz Virág, she worked at Gyermekpszichológiai Rendelő, the Faludi Street Outpatient's Clinic for Child Psychotherapy in Budapest founded by Júlia György in 1968.
Sára Klaniczay underwent training analysis with Imre Hermann and received her training in child analysis from Lillian Rotter. She was a training analyst and supervisor of the Hungarian Psychoanalytical Society [Magyar Pszichoanalitikus Egyesület (MPE)] and a member of the International Psychoanalytical Association since 1983. She also lectured at the College for Teachers of Handicapped Children (Gyógypedagógiai Foiskolá) and took part in the postgraduate training course of Debrecen University, teaching child psychotherapy.
Sára Klaniczay focused her interest on the study of stuttering, its theory and psychotherapy, basing on Imre Hermann's theory of clinging. She found that in a high percentage of children treated by her, a lengthy separation from their mother preceded the development of stuttering. In her view frustration of the child's need to cling is fundamental to the formation of stuttering.
In 2004 she was awarded the MPE Ferenczy Memorial Medal for her contributions to child psychotherapy and childhood stuttering. (Top of the article)

Vilma Kovács née Prosznitz (1879-1940)

Photo: © Boston Psycho-
analytic Society and Institute

Vilma Kovács was born in 1879* in Szeged in Hungary as the youngest of three daughters. Her family, descendants of Spanish Jews, found itself destitute after the early death of the father. Vilma was married at the age of fifteen and against her will to a cousin, Zsigmond Székely, who was twenty-two years older than she. By the age of nineteen she was the mother of three children: Alice, Olga and Ferencz. Alice Székely-Kovács, like her mother, became a psychoanalyst, Olga Székely-Kovács (Dormandi) became a painter and was renowned, among other things, for her caricatures of psychoanalysts. Olga Dormandi's daughter, Judith Dupont, continued the psychoanalytic lineage in France.
Exhausted by three births, Vilma Prosznitz-Székely contracted tuberculosis and had to spend periods in a sanatorium, where she met the same-aged architect Frigyes (Frederic) Kovács. She married him after a difficult divorce from her first husband who forbade her to see her children. They joined their mother only after a separation of several years and were later adopted by Frédéric Kovács.
Around 1921 a serious case of agoraphobia led Vilma Kovács into analysis with the Hungarian psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi. Ferenczi soon recognized her talents and continued her treatment as a training analysis. She became a member of the Hungarian Psychoanalytical Society in 1924 and chair of its training committee in 1925. Vilma Kovács was a brilliant disciple of Ferenczi, a highly reputed training analyst and one of the first to systematize the psychoanalytic training system. The Kovács residence at 12 Mészáros Street, Budapest, was the domicile of the Hungarian Society and the Psychoanalytic Polyclinic.
In 1923 Vilma Kovács translated Sigmund Freud's essay Beyond the pleasure principle [A halálösztön és az életösztönök] into Hungarian. Her first own psychoanalytic study was the analysis of a case of "convulsive tic" (1925). Her most important contribution to psychoanalytic theory is her paper Kiképzö analízis és kontroll analízis [Training and control-analysis], in which she questioned the modular system of psychoanalytic training (training analysis, control-analysis, theory), introduced by Max Eitingon. Anticipating Jacques Lacan's conception, Vilma Kovács suggested that the trainee's supervisor on his first cases should always be his own training analyst. The latter, she argued, was more able to understand the origins of the trainee's counter-transference than a second control-analyst.
The rise of fascism in Hungary led to an exodus of Hungarian psychoanalysts. After the premature death of her daughter Alice Balint in her English exile, Vilma Kovács followed Marie Bonaparte's invitation to Paris in 1940. But she returned to Budapest that same year. Physically and psychically worn out, she contracted a kidney disease and died at the age of 56 years. (Top of the article)

• *Birth certificate Vilma Prosznitz - I owe this information to Anna Borgos

Kata Lévy née von Freund-Tószeghi (1883-1969)

Katá (Katalin) Lévy was born in Budapest as the youngest of four children. Her father, Vilmos von Freund-Tószeghy, was a wealthy brewery owner of Jewish origin. Her elder brother, Anton (Antal) von Freund-Tószeghy, a patient and friend of Sigmund Freud, was an outstanding sponsor of the psychoanalytic movement. Kata von Freund trained as a teacher for mentally handicapped children, but did not practise as one. Instead, she devoted herself to sculpture.
In 1908 she married the internist Lajos Lévy (1875-1961), who was a co-founder of the Hungarian Psychoanalytical Society in 1913, but had never practised as an analyst. Their son Willy Lévy (i. e. the sculptor Peter Lambda), born in 1911, lived as a teenager in the family of August Aichhorn, a Viennese psychoanalyst and a close friend of the Lévys.
In 1918 Kata Lévy began an analysis with Sigmund Freud during his stay in Budapest, continuing it in Vienna in 1920. She then underwent psychoanalytic training with Sándor Ferenczi in Budapest and became a full member of the Hungarian Psychoanalytical Society in 1928. Kata Lévy was particularly interested in pedagogy and child analysis. In 1936 she went to Vienna to attend the seminar on child analysis of Anna Freud, with whom she shared a lifelong friendship.
In the 1930s Kata Lévy organised psychoanalytic seminars with teachers in Budapest and worked as a counsellor of education in a girls' school. During the Second World War the Lévys stayed in Budapest. They managed to survive fascism, but lost their entire property. In Communist Hungary Kata Lévy worked as an educational advisor and privately as a psychoanalyst until 1954, when she and her husband emigrated to London. Kata Lévy became a member of the British Psychoanalytical Society and joined the staff of Anna Freud's Hampstead Child Therapy Clinic. She collaborated in a research project on the simultaneous analysis of mother and child organised by Dorothy Burlingham, and published an article about the simultaneous treatment of a girl who suffered from school phobia, and her overprotective mother (1960). (Top of the article)

Lucy Liebermann (1899-1967)

Lucy (Lukrécia) Liebermann was born into a Jewish family in Budapest. Her father Győző Ágost Liebermann was a freight forwarder. She studied at the Budapest Teachers' Training College of Special Education, graduating in 1926. At the same time, she participated in a composition course at the Academy of Music and studied movement art with Olga Szentpál. She started her healing carrier as a therapist of movement disorders at the neurological ward of the Pest Jewish Community Hospital. From 1928 to 1937 she worked in the ortho-pedagogical Laboratory of Psychopathology and Psychotherapy of Leopold Szondi, the founder of fate analysis, and at the State Institute for the Speech Impaired (1928-1937). In 1928 she participated in founding the Hungarian Psychological Association, where she held various leading positions.
She underwent training analysis with Michael Balint from 1930 to 1932 and attended control analysis with him from 1933. In 1937 she became an associated member of the Hungarian Psychoanalytical Society. She specialised in child analysis and published a number of studies on speech, movement and personality disorders in children and adolescents, on suicide in childhood, and on the principles of family group therapy. In her Case history of a borderline personality dealing with the case of a borderline psychotic stammerer, she explained the psychodynamics of stammering by a fixation in the schizoid developmental position (as postulated by Melanie Klein). In the 1930s and 1940s she participated in an avant-garde callisthenic movement and sympathised with the European School, an assembly of Hungarian artists who were interested in the relationship between art and psychoanalysis.
In 1937 Lucy Liebermann established a child guidance service at the First Paediatric Clinic of the Pazmany-Peter University Medical School at Budapest and directed it first as an employee of the clinic and later, from 1959 to 1967, as a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Pál Gegesi Kiss, head of the Paediatric Clinic, was the co-author of some of her studies on personality disorders in children. Between 1945 and 1948 she also lectured movement therapy at the Special Education Teachers' College. Following the dissolution of the Hungarian Psychoanalytical Society in 1949, she kept her membership in the International Psychoanalytic Association.
Lucy Pátzay Liebermann's first husband was Zsigmond Cselényi Walleshausen (1887?-?), a painter and puppeteer, whom she divorced after four years. In 1924 she married the Hungarian sculptor Pál Pátzay (1896-1979). She separated from Pátzay in 1945 and married the civil engineer Antal Petneházy (1895-1968). (Top of the article)

Magda Ligeti (1909-1977)

Magda (Magdolna) Ligeti was born in Budapest, the daughter of Antónia Singer and the journalist Jenő Ligeti (Lusztig). She attended the Szeged girls' high school Árpád-házi Szent Erzsébet until 1928 and then studied Medicine at the Ferenc József University in Szeged, graduating in 1934. From 1935 to 1943 she worked in the neurology department of the Szabolcs Street Hospital of the Pest Jewish Community. After the end of the war, she was a neurologist and chief physician in psychotherapeutic outpatient clinics at various hospitals. A focus of her work was the treatment of alcoholics.
Magda Ligeti was a psychoanalytically oriented therapist but was not a member of the Hungarian Psychoanalytical Society. She was particularly interested in child analysis and the promotion of sexual education. Her book on this subject, Gyermekeknek felnöttekröl [For Children about Adults], published in 1946, caused a storm of indignation in Hungary. The Ministry of Education, the Writers' Association and the Catholic social activist Margit Slachta demanded a ban on this "pornographic" book, which was pronounced by the Budapest Court in 1947. Ligeti was later recognized as a Hungarian pioneer of modern sexology.
In 1940 Magda Ligeti married the actor Sándor Peti (né Kanitzer) (1898-1973). Together with Peti she was in close relationships with literary and artistic circles in Budapest. Among her friends was Miklós Radnóti, a Hungarian poet who was murdered by the Nazis in 1944. Magda Ligeti, who had attempted suicide after the death of Sándor Peti in 1973, finally died four years later by suicide. (Top of the article)

Livia Nemes (1919-2006)

Livia Nemes was born into a Jewish family in Budapest, the youngest daughter of József Nemes und Irma Klein. Her parents ran a needlework shop in Buda. As a girl, she was treated by her aunt, the psychiatrist Lilly Hajdu, who impressed her greatly. After attending a commercial art school, Livia Nemes did a Montessori training course in order to set up a private kindergarten. In 1941 she began an analysis with Róbert Bak. After Bak's emigration to the United States she went into further analysis with István Székács-Schönberger. From 1942 on she participated in private lessons of the psychologist Ferenc Mérei.
Livia Nemes survived the German occupation and the terror of the fascist Arrow Crossers in Hungary by using forged papers. From 1945 to 1948 she studied philosophy, pedagogy and psychology at the Péter Pázmány University in Budapest and graduated as a teacher. Subsequently she became an assistant in the Budapest Pedagogical College and an associate of Mérei at his National Institute of Educational Psychology (Országos Neveléstudományi Intézet). After the communist takeover in 1948/49 the Institute was liquidated in 1950, because its teachings contradicted the principles of socialist education. In the following six years Livia Nemes earned her living by working in a textile factory. After that she was a lecturer at the State Pedagogical Institute from 1957 to 1959. In 1959 she was arrested, like Mérei, and charged with anti state activities and was sentenced to three years imprisonment.
In 1963 she finally was able to continue her psychoanalytic training and underwent training analysis with Imre Hermann. From 1962 to 1967 she worked as a clinical psychologist at the Korányi Tbc Institute, and from 1968 to 1980 at Fővárosi Gyermekpszichológiai Szakrendelő, the Faludi Street Outpatient's Clinic for Child Psychotherapy in Budapest founded by Júlia György. In 1970 she established a seminar on developmental psychology at the Budapest Institute of Child Psychology, where psychologists and psychiatrists could study psychoanalytic child therapy. She qualified as a PhD in 1971.
In 1975 Livia Nemes and four other Hungarian psychoanalysts became direct members of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA). A psychoanalytic study group headed by Livia Nemes was established within the Hungarian Psychiatric Association in 1981. In 1983 the Hungarian group was recognised by the IPA as a Provisional Society, to which Livia Nemes served as a president for eight years. In 1989 the Magyar Pszichoanalitikus Egyesület became a Component Society of the IPA.
Best known are Nemes' contributions to the history of the Hungarian psychoanalysis. She was particularly interested in the work of Imre Hermann and published numerous articles about him. In addition, she dealt with the relationship between Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi and wrote essays on developmental psychology and on the influence of psychoanalysis on writers and fiction. (Top of the article)

Lili Perl née Balla (1891-1965)

Lili (Lívia, Lilly) Perl was born into a Jewish family in Budapest. Her father Zsigmond Balla (Blau) was a wine-merchant in Budapest, her mother Berta Altschul came from Prague. In 1917 Lívia Balla married Tibor Perl (1882-1945), a bank clerk, who later became Assistant Director of the Hungarian General Credit Bank. Their daughter Zsuzsa was born in 1919.
In 1928 Lili Perl received a certificate as an educator of difficult children from the International Association of Individual Psychology. In the beginning of the 1930s, she worked as a pedagogue in a summer camp for delinquent children established by the baroness Erzsébet Weiss in one of her villas and led by Julia György. In 1939 she gave a guest lecture on "Oral motives in the treatment of neurosis" at the Hungarian Psychoanalytical Society [Magyar Pszichoanalitikus Egyesület (MPE)]. According to a request which István Hollós sent to the Emergency Committee in 1939, Lilly Perl-Balla was then a candidate of the MPE.
She survived the war and the German occupation with forged papers and became an associated member of the MPE in 1946. After the Communists had forced the dissolution of the MPE in 1949, Lili Perl continued to practice psychoanalysis privately during the 1950s. The Hungarian composer and pianist György Kurtág and his wife Márta Kurtág were among her last analysands. (Top of the article)

Margit Pfeiffer (1897-1984)

Margit Pfeiffer was born in Budapest as the daughter of Hellmann Mosonyi Pfeiffer, a graphic designer, and his wife Gizella Taub.* She completed her medical studies at the Péter Pázmány University in Budapest in 1921 (MD) and specialised in paediatrics. Margit Pfeiffer was an adherent of Leopold Szondi’s fate analysis and in the 1930s worked in Szondi’s ortho-pedagogical Laboratory of Psychopathology and Psychotherapy – together with Erzsébet Kardos, Vera Groák and Lucy Liebermann. In addition to her private practice she served as a physician at the Jewish school on Wesselényi Street in Budapest.
Like other pupils of Szondi, Margit Pfeiffer was interested in psychoanalysis and became a disciple of Imre Hermann, a leading psychoanalyst of the Budapest School known for his psychology of thinking and his theory of attachment. In 1944 she was listed as a member, probably a candidate, of the Hungarian Psychoanalytical Society [Magyar Pszichoanalitikus Egyesület (MPE)]. She and some other Hungarian analysts survived fascism and war in Budapest.
After the end of the war, she [Margit Schachtitz?] was an associate member of the MPE from 1946 until the MPE was dissolved in 1949. In 1967 Margit Pfeiffer became a direct member of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) at the 25th IPA Congress in Copenhagen. She was chief physician at the child psychotherapy clinic of Péterfy Sándor Utcai Hospital in Pest, until she retired. (Top of the article)

• * I owe this information to Péter Kozák

Erzsébet Radó-Révész (1887-1923)

The physician and psychoanalyst Erzsébet (Elisabeth) Révész was born in Nagyvarad in Hungary (Transleithania). Her brother Ladislaus Révész was also a psychoanalyst. She belonged to the first generation of Hungarian physicians, took her medical degree in 1913 at the Budapest University and specialised in neurology and psychiatry. She worked as a psychiatrist in Budapest and in the Purkersdorf Sanatorium outside Vienna, when in 1916 she began analysis with Sigmund Freud. After several months of interruption, her analysis was continued in 1918. In the same year, she became a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society and the first female member of the Hungarian Psychoanalytical Society. Sigmund Freud thought highly of her, regarding her as a future assistant of Sándor Ferenczi.
In 1919, Erzsébet Révész was appointed assistant professor at the psychiatric clinic of the medical university in Budapest, headed by Ernő Moravcsik. Her papers presented in the Hungarian Psychoanalytical Society were about the themes "Psycho-analysis of a case of kleptomania (1919), "Synaesthesic hallucination as an hysterical symptom" (1921), "On the phylogenesis of globus hystericus" (1922) and "A case of menstrual depression" (1922). She worked as a training analyst in Budapest, and from 1921 onwards she organised the library of the Hungarian Psychoanalytical Society. Imre Hermann and Sándor Radó were among her analysands.
In 1919 she married her analysand Sándor Radó (1890-1972), a physician and in 1913 co-founder of the Hungarian Psychoanalytical Society. Their marriage turned out to be unhappy, Radó went to Berlin in 1922. After the death of her ambivalently beloved father, Erzsébet Révész went into analysis with Ferenczi. In the middle of her analysis, she fell ill with progressive pernicious anaemia and died in her sixth or seventh month of pregnancy. (Top of the article)

Lillian Rotter (1896-1981)

Lillian Rotter was born into an educated Jewish family in Budapest. Her father was a journalist with Pester Lloyd, Hungary's leading German-language newspaper; her mother was a singing teacher. Lillian Rotter's childhood was overshadowed by a hip disease requiring several operations and leading to a lifelong limp. She studied medicine in Budapest and graduated in 1920. As a student she frequented, like Edith Gyömröi and Lilly Hajdu, the left-wing Galilei Circle. In 1923 she married the physician Tivadar Kertész (1889-1979).
Lillian Rotter began her psychoanalytic training in 1920. She underwent training analysis with Imre Hermann and became a member of the Hungarian Psychoanalytical Society in 1930. She was particularly interested in female sexuality and the mother-child relation. Her studies on psychosexual development were greatly appreciated by her colleagues. In her article Zur Psychologie der weiblichen Sexualität [About the psychology of female sexuality] (1934) she stated, that a girl's discovery in being able to produce erections in boys or men leads to feelings of power and self-confidence. Contrary to the concept of female penis envy, Rotter concluded that a woman who is aware of her power over men and who plays such an important role in sexual-reproductive life seldom feel castrated and inferior.
After 1938 the situation for Hungarian Jews worsened. Lillian Rotter-Kertész and her husband were arrested in 1941 and temporarily interned in the Budapest ghetto. Despite the danger, she and Endre Petö led their so-called mother-seminars, published in 1946 under the title A gyermek lelki fejlodése [The Mental Development of the Child].
When war was over, similarly to many colleagues, Lillian Rotter joined the ruling Communist Party. She served as the Psychological and Mental Hygiene Advisor to the capital's Board of Health. After the dissolution of the Hungarian Psychoanalytical Society in 1949, Lillian Rotter earned her living by working as a laboratory physician. In the mid-1960s, she participated in the reorganisation of the Hungarian Psychoanalytical Society and established a seminar on child analysis.
In her last years, Lillian Rotter suffered from depression due to a serious illness of her husband. Surviving him by two years, she died of old age in 1981. (Top of the article)

Zelma Rubin-Färber (1894-1952)

Sulamith Szendike Färber was born in Szeged, the daughter of Jakab Färber and Malvina Weisz. She was a member of the left-wing Galilei circle, a board member since 1913. There she met the writer and lawyer László Rubin (1888-1942), a founding member and later chairman of the Galilei circle, whom she married in 1914. Their son Péter was born in 1918.
In 1917 Zelma Rubin-Färber completed her medical studies at the University of Budapest. In the 1920s, she worked with difficult and mentally retarded children at Gyógypedagógiai Gyermekszanatórium, an ortho-pedagogical children's sanatorium in Budapest led by Margit Révész. During this time, she wrote articles for the magazine Magyar Gyógypedagógia. In 1936 she qualified as a pediatrician.
In 1939, she presented her paper "A case of anxiety neurosis" at the Hungarian Psychoanalytical Society [Magyar Pszichoanalitikus Egyesület (MPE)] and in that same year became a member of the MPE. Zelma Rubin-Färber survived the German occupation and the fascist terror in Budapest, efforts to obtain affidavits for her and other Hungarian psychoanalysts had failed. In 1947, she lectured about "Children with problems" at the MPE. A year later she became treasurer of the MPE, just before the society was dissolved in 1949, under the pressure of the Communist government. In the late 1940s, she married Bélá Szogyén, living in Budapest, where she died of heart disease in 1952. (Top of the article)

Piroska Stein née Fényes (1892-1950)

Piroska Stein was born into a Hungarian-Jewish family in Kassa (Košice), the daughter of Etel Weisz and the lawyer Samu Fényes. She was married to Frigyes Stein (1889-?), a chemical engineer. Piroska Stein graduated in pedagogy (PhD) and became an adherent of Alfred Adler's Individual psychology. She was a member of the Hungarian Association of Individual Psychology (Magyar Individuálpszichológiai Egyesületnek MIPE), where she presented a paper on "Átöröklés és nevelés" [Inheritance and education] in 1934. In the 1930s, she wrote some more papers on pedagogic and educational issues.
Piroska Stein survived the fascist terror in Budapest and became a full member of the Hungarian Psychoanalytic Association ([Magyar Pszichoanalitikus Egyesület (MPE)] in 1946. She worked as a school psychologist and held lectures on education issues for the staff of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee which cooperated with the MPE. After the dissolution of the MPE in 1949 - the Communist government rejected psychoanalysis as a subversive ideology - Piroska Stein worked as a high school teacher.

Teréz Virág (1930-2000)

The psychoanalyst and child psychologist Teréz Virág pioneered the Holocaust syndrome theory in Hungary. She was born into a Jewish family in Budapest, her father died in 1943, her mother was deported in 1944 to the concentration camp Ravensbrück, from where she returned in May 1945. Living in the Pest ghetto, Teréz Virág and her sister survived the fascist terror (presumably thanks to one of Lajos Gidófalvy's and Raoul Wallenberg's rescue operations).
Teréz Virág studied economics from 1949 to 1953 and subsequently taught this subject. She married Péter Kardos, with whom she had two children: Katalin (*1952) and Endre (*1957). In the 1960s, she studied psychology at the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, received her diploma in 1967 and her doctorate in 1972. She underwent training analysis with Imre Hermann and became a member and training analyst of the Hungarian Psychoanalytical Society. Like Livia Nemes and Ágnes Binét, she worked at Gyermekpszichológiai Rendelő, the Budapest Child Psychotherapy Ambulatory Clinic founded by Júlia György in 1968. Until 1987 she was senior psychotherapist at the Budapest Children's Hospital Madarász utcai Gyermekkórház.
Since the beginning of the 1980s, Teréz Virág concentrated on analysing the transgenerational transmission of Holocaust trauma. In 1990, within the framework of the Hungarian Jewish Cultural Association she organised the first Hungarian Holocaust discussion group. In 1991 together with her husband she created the KÚT Foundation with the aim of developing a therapeutic center for victims of social persecution. In 1993 she set up the first psychotherapeutic clinic for the treatment of Hungarian Holocaust survivors and their descendants in Budapest that she led until her death. Teréz Virág was the first to identify Holocaust syndrome in the grandchildren of socially traumatised individuals and has published widely on her work with three generations of Hungarian Holocaust survivors' families. (Top of the article)

Lilla Wagner (1903-1978)

Lilla Wagner was born in Budapest, the daughter of Marcell Wagner and Mária Löwy. Her father was an engineer. She studied philosophy, psychology and aesthetics at the Ferenc József University of Szeged and graduated as a doctor of philosophy in 1926. In 1922 she married the Jewish lawyer Mátyás Vészi (1892-1959?). Their daughter Marcella was born four years later. In the 1930s Lilla Wagner was a member of the Hungarian Psychological Society and the literary János Vajda Society. She was involved in the women's movement and attended the 1930 International Women's Congress in Vienna, where she presented as the representative of the Hungarian Women's Associations a paper on statelessness.
In 1951, she and Mátyás Vészi emigrated to England. They settled in London, where Lilla Vészi-Wagner - after her emigration: Veszy-Wagner - initially worked as a librarian and then as a research assistant. She became a member of the British Psychoanalytical Society and practised as a psychoanalyst in London until 1977. It was Lilla Veszy-Wagner who compiled the Gesamtregister [Cumulative Index] to Sigmund Freud's Gesammelte Werke (Vol. XVIII).
Lilla Wagner published legal and social science articles, psychological and psychoanalytical essays, and also novels, poems and fairy tales. Among others, she published a sociology of hungarian folk tales (1928) and an outline of psychological anthropology (1946). A main focus of her numerous psychoanalytical essays is the interpretation of myths, tales and literature. Best known is her controversial study A negyedik Petöfi [The Fourth Petöfi] about the work and personality of Sándor Petöfi, Hungary's national poet who died during the Hungarian Revolution of 1848.
The "fourth Petöfi" means the psychoanalytically interpreted Petöfi, in addition to the poet, the freedom fighter and the national hero Sándor Petöfi. Lilla Wagner concluded from her interpretation of Petöfi's imagery that his hatred against tyrants was based on his ambivalent relation to his father, while his patriotism and his nature and love poetry were connected with his relation to his mother. (Top of the article)