István Székács-Schönberger was born in Budapest in 1907. In 1932, he received his M.D. from the Pázmány Péter University Budapest. The years 1932-33 he spent studying physics and chemistry at the Chemical Institute of the university. From 1927 to 1935, he worked as research assistant under Professor Pál Hári at the university's Institute for Biochemistry and Pathochemistry. He did his psychoanalytic training with Géza Róheim from 1932 to 1938. In 1939, he delivered his inaugural lecture at a meeting of the Hungarian Psychoanalytical Association, and was elected a member in the same year. After the war years, he became department head at the Institute for Biochemistry of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (1950-1952). As a senior researcher at the department of virology of the National Institute of Public Health he was asked in 1953 to set up a biochemistry and isotope department; it was here that he worked as head of department until his retirement in 1970. In the past three decades, he has been training psychoanalyst to doctors and psychologists who want to become psychoanalysts themselves, or want to have a working knowledge of psychoanalysis. He is one of the training analysts of the Hungarian Psychoanalytical Association. The Institute for Advanced Medical Studies in Budapest recognized his credentials as a psychotherapist in 1985. Dr Székács is a member of the International Association of Psychotherapists.
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[...] I realized that we Jews would be thrown out of the Institute. We did not have tenure; Jews could not be appointed. It was then - in 1933 - that I decided to go into psychoanalysis, for that interested me. My wife, who had been analyzed by Géza Róheim, also had a hand in my reaching this decision. I discussed my plan with Lajos Lévy, who was a member of the Hungarian Psychoanalytical Association, consulting physician to Freud, and also a close friend of Ferenczi's. He was the one who'd brought Freud and Ferenczi together. At first, Ferenczi didn't quite understand, and was somewhat ambivalent about Freud's work; it took him eight years to discover its significance. At that point, he went to Vienna, and became one of Freud's closest associates. Both Ferenczi and Hári were in Lévy's care before they died.
Lévy welcomed the idea of my becoming a psychoanalyst, and suggested that I put in my application with Imre Hermann, the chairman of the Analytical Association's education committee. I did just that. When I selected Géza Róheim as my training analyst, Lévy said my choice couldn't have been better, for Róheim was brilliant, an exceptionally intelligent man, a genius. He knew the Róheims well, for he was also their family doctor. Both Mr and Mrs Róheim had contracted malaria during their expedition to Australia, and she could never be fully cured. She had periodic attacks of the fever, and required constant medical attention.
My training analysis was a lighthearted, cheerful experience, nothing traumatic. Róheim had a great sense of humor, something I had always appreciated. We became very close to each other. There's countertransference in the relationship of every analyst to his patient, i.e., a positive emotional reaction develops between them. With Róheim and me it was more than that. We developed a close friendship. When, in 1953, living in the U.S., he learned that I was among those named in the infamous "doctors' trial" and put in jail for nine months of preliminary custody, he said, somewhat jokingly, that he felt he was to blame, for his analysis had cured me of a lot of things, but it had not cured me of my communist beliefs.
Our sessions went on for a total of five years between 1933 and 1938; after the first eighteen months I started to deal with patients of my own, so my own personal analysis really lasted for only a year and a half. After all, I was not a patient. For the following three and a half years, up until the time that he emigrated, I was in what we call "controlled analysis".
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There are established procedures in analytical training. The trainee is in analysis, then comes a time when his analyst feels that he is ready to take on analytical work himself. The analyst reports this to the Association's education committee who, in turn, instruct the trainee to attend theoretical and practical seminars, and to take on two patients. When I was in training, both seminars met once every two weeks. The theoretical one was led by Imre Hermann. He decided which classical works he wanted to discuss at each of the ten meetings of the seminar. Meeting roughly twice a month, we spent about six months on each of the classics. The practical, or didactic, seminar was led by Vilma Kovács. She had been Ferenczi's most brilliant and most loyal student, and was a fascinating person. It was she who systematized psychoanalytical training, a method different from, and in my opinion better and more thorough, than what has become the practice internationally. The Hungarian editions of her papers describing the training method have been recently published by Júlia Szilágyi. At every meeting of her seminar, one trainee had to give an approximately ninety-minute report on one of his patients. This meant that each trainee had the floor once during the semester. Alice Bálint - Vilma Kovács's daughter - Zsigmond Pfeiffer, and Endre Almásy also took part in the seminar. Their frequent comments, corrections and advice contributed immensely to the analytical skills of the young trainees. I know that I learned a great deal from them.
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What were the techniques and theoretical trends that most influenced your analytical work in the early days of your career?
The most important personality of post-Freudian analysis was Melanie Klein. She was not generally accepted at the time, but my analyst, Róheim, thought very highly of her, and Melanie Klein's views were nicely substantiated in the course of my own analysis.
Is it the mother-child symbiosis that you have in mind?
Precisely. And, of course, Melanie Klein's whole theory of introjection, projection, its body-destruction fantasy, and all the rest. Unlike most psychoanalysts, I accepted these theories, and as a result, I was considered a disciple of Melanie Klein's. I wrote my very first psychoanalytic paper, the one on Descartes, in the spirit of Klein. I was thirty-two years old and the youngest psychoanalyst present when I read it at the International Psychoanalytical Congress in Paris. Ernest Jones, who was presiding, congratulated me upon my presentation, and immediately asked for the paper; he wanted it published in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis.
It has been said that it was his attacks on Ferenczi that Professor Jones wanted to compensate for in backing Melanie Klein. Is that true?
Jones was a funny sort of character. As you probably know, Ferenczi had been Melanie Klein's analyst. Jones, while he wrote absolutely slanderous falsehoods about Ferenczi, gave his wholehearted support to Melanie Klein. But to get back to the congress: I stood there in the Salle d'Iéna, next to Róheim, feeling like a dumb little boy among the great old men when all of a sudden the door across the hall opened, and a lady entered like a queen with her entourage. Róheim fell quiet as the group came directly to me, and the queen congratulated me. The queen was Melanie Klein. I was dumbfounded. I wasn't even a member of the Association, which had very strict criteria for membership. Applicants had to deliver a presentation to gain acceptance, and my paper did not qualify because a qualifying presentation had to be a description of the work one had done with a patient.
And, unfortunately, Descartes was not one of your patients...
Hardly. But when I came home, I gave another presentation to the Association, this time the case history of a patient, and I was accepted.
When you went to Paris to read that particular article, were you not afraid of your reception? I can well imagine that the Viennese, headed by Anna Freud, were not too happy to hear a presentation given in the spirit of Melanie Klein.
Anna Freud was there, of course, but those ill feelings never came to the surface. In fact, Jones offered me a choice of two positions abroad, one in Australia and one in Chile. But I came home. The people in Budapest were happy for my success, and expected great things from me in the future. There were four of us that the Budapest School looked upon as the eventual leaders of the Association: Robert Bak, my contemporary, Andrew Petõ, who later became famous in the United States, Erzsébet Kardos, Andrew Petõ's wife, who was killed by the Nazis and myself. Needless to say, things turned out differently....
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How do you see Ferenczi's illness? I don't mean his anaemia. There were some rumors, even some speculation in the literature, that "something was amiss" with Ferenczi, especially in his later years. How do you see this, personally, or as an psychoanalyst?
The "something amiss" was nothing but hearsay. Ferenczi suffered from pernicious anaemia. Today, this illness is treated with B12, but this had yet to be discovered. In its final stages, the disease causes cerebral palsy, which it did, and this is what led Jones to believe that Ferenczi suffered from progressive paralysis. Yet, his last articles were excellent. I always say that Freud had two disciples: the classical Karl Ábrahám and the romantic Sándor Ferenczi. Ábrahám was an extremely precise person, while Ferenczi was witty and had a lighter touch; he was not afraid of experimenting, or of operating with hypotheses which, at some later point, he would retract as having been mistaken.
I believe that the basic difference between the Budapest School and the traditional, orthodox Freudian Viennese School is that the Budapest psychoanalysts attached much more importance to the mother-child relationship. Do you agree with this rather summary and crude generalization?
The difference had to do with a combination of a great many theoretical issues and matters of technique. For one thing, the Viennese School in general, and Anna Freud in particular, maintained that a child was ready to be analyzed at the age of four. I happen to agree with Melanie Klein, who conducted very successful analyses on two-year-olds, children too young to really speak, so she had to base her interpretation on their other manifestations as well. According to current thinking, even the self-expression of infants can be evaluated from a psychoanalytical point of view, although they cannot be considered a part of analytical practice. To my mind, the fact that Freud and the Viennese School put the lower limit of analysis rigidly at age four is a serious liability. On the other hand, the kind of infant analysis that Melanie Klein developed in England was never established in Hungary either.
Would you say that the main difference between the Viennese and the Budapest Schools is that the one puts the emphasis on the father-child relationship, i.e., on the Oedipus complex, while the other focuses on the mother-child symbiosis?
I don't think you can put the two approaches in opposite corners, for they are equally important, and should be used simultaneously. Nor do I find terms like "Oedipus complex" to be particularly helpful today. They were very practical at one time, and they are still serviceable shorthand in a conversation for a whole complex of notions. But what is important here is that we are dealing with the parent-child relationship. We know that at one stage of development, the child is more attached to the parent of the same sex, and at another stage, to the parent of the opposite sex. These stages come at different times with boys than with girls. But a categorical determination that certain things are unthinkable before the age of four is wrong. When we discover something, like Freud discovered the significance of the Oedipus complex, we tend to believe that our discovery can solve every problem in the world. In time, however, we realize that we might have found the answer to a great many problems, but not to all of them.
Would you agree that the maternal therapeutic approach - which is associated with Ferenczi - is more typical of the Budapest School than of the Viennese?
I wouldn't say that. There's no such thing as the analyst being just the mother; the role he plays is, in some measure, independent of his personality. In the course of analysis we come upon some things that represent the mother, other things that represent the father. Thus I, a male psychoanalyst, find that at times the patient identifies me with his mother, at other times with his father.
Is best forgotten!
Why?
It's an utterly untenable piece of fantasy. There isn't a shred of evidence to support it.
Róheim's approach seems to disprove Freud's primal horde theory in certain respects; that makes Freud's primal horde theory and Totem and Taboo fantasy, too?
Indeed it does.
What about the culture-epoch theory that forms the basis of Róheim's developmental psychology? Is that just a myth?
No, that was something he actually observed. Róheim's views were based on field research that he himself had done.
So you'd say that the criterion is whether or not a theory is based on observation, on empirical evidence?
Naturally. Freud's theory is a myth. He didn't know any better, because he'd never done any field work. I happen to know that Freud was very much interested in Róheim's Australian expedition, and he very much looked forward to hearing of its results. But when Róheim published his findings, Freud was genuinely angry, and refused to acknowledge it, because it did not square with what he had written in Totem and Taboo. Freud was getting on in years by that time. Though he had an excellent natural science background, and was self-critical all his life, in old age he developed a narcissistic attachment to his own fantasies; in this, Freud was like quite a few other great scientists. And so he was unable to admit that he'd been mistaken, and that Róheim was right. Mind you, I don't really think "self-criticism" was called for; Freud's Totem and Taboo is full of fascinating ideas.
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