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The psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi’s Clinical Notebook 1932 has now been published in Hungarian. Péter György Hárs headed his piece "Medusa’s cracked looking glass" which shows that his intention is to interpret. Medusa is the lady of the sea (thalassa), if we look into the water (thalassa?), as in a looking glas, we catch a glimpse not only of ourselves but also of Medusa, a severed part of ourselves. Hárs metaphorically identifies keeping a diary and looking into a mirror. According to him Narcissus and Perseus are the archetypal diarists. He discusses mimicry as a mirror-property not only in Ferenczi but also in Róheim and Lacan, mimicry that can be disguise or imitation, but also self-identification. What, Hárs asks, links one’s relationship to the mirror image with mimicry and thus with self-identification? Ferenczi notes that schizophrenia is a mimicry reaction, but mimicry can be interpreted as a longing for peace, as a reconciliation with circumstances, as an instinct suggesting calm, indeed as a reflection of environmental effects, which takes us back once again to the looking glass, and mirroring. Hárs mentions that, according to Ferenczi, the diarist, solitude without a mirror could well produce a fear of solitude as a trauma, a trauma that may well be related to schizophrenia. But Medusa is also a theatrical mask, and according to Hárs, Ferenczi’s two creations, Orpha and Astra, may well be Ferenczi’s masks as a diarist.

What is a work of art? That is the question Ottó Gecser puts in connection with Danto’s book The transfiguration of the commonplace. The book contains a wealth of analyses. The whole armoury of analytical philosophy is on display. Danto also ventures into the territories of traditional and even of classical aesthetics but he works out his own, independent theory of art and offers a reinterpretation and precise definition of key terms like expression, style, metaphor, imitation or representation. According to Danto, Gecser writes, a work of art can be defined in many different ways. One possible definition is to to claim that only family resemblence can be detected in the case of works of art, just like games resist characterisation by an aggregate of necessary and sufficient conditions. But one could define it also in the way it is customary to define counterfeits and imitations. The right definition, however, is to interpret it as representation and then to set out the mode in which the special meanings find expression.

István Perczel surveys and explains a patristic chrestomathy compiled by the late Katalin Vidrányi. According to him the problems of Christology lay at the centre of her thinking, that is why she compiled a chrestomathy of the Greek Fathers the backbone of which is made up by Christology in the widest sense of the term, that is writings which deal with the relationship of the human and divine nature. The volume naturally reflects Katalin Vidrányi’s attitudes, sympathies and antipathies. Origen is her favourite, she therefore excludes authors hostile to Origen and includes others whom she likes, such as Theodoretos of Cyrus, John of Apamea and Pseudo-Dionysius the Aeropagite. Perczel is not satisfied with the way Zoltán Frenyó prepared the text for the printer and provided a preface. Frenyó does not provide a guide to Katalin Vidrányi’s principles of selection, he does not even notice how many specific questions are raised, he does not discuss a single genuine problem of patristics but instead does a scissors and paste job based on handbooks of the third rank. This is an important book, the nature of the subject means that another similar publication is unlikely for some time. It is therefore regretable that readers are left without a proper guide to the text.

Ernô Marosi’s Image and Likeness. Art and reality in Hungary in the 14th and 15th centuries, the subject of this issue’s Notice by many hands, is judged an important book by all of them. The book contains four chapters: the Pictorial Chronicle, the basic account of the Hungarian Middle Ages; the avatars of Saint Ladislas, King of Hungary; the Saint George statue in Prague as a liturgical object in medieval Central Europe; and the role of the image in the art of the times of Sigismund, King of Hungary and Bohemia, and Holy Roman Emperor.

János Végh argues that Marosi’s book is hard to define since it covers so many different things, and yet every chapter deals with the same key question: how were art and reality related at a particular time, to what degree can we believe the artistic record, and how receptive was the public at the time–that is the small number of educated courtiers–to the visual presentation of certain abstract ideas.

Tünde Wehli confines herself to Marosi on the Pictorial Chronicle. According to her, it is novel on Marosi’s part not to restrict himself to stylistic and iconographic aspects when writing about the MS as a cultic object; that he also discusses the image of the world of those who produced it, and indeed also of those for whom they produced it.

János Bak points to the fact that on the title page knights in full armour, who embody the new feudal age, stand to the right of the King, and warriors accoutred and armed in the eastern manner to his left. Could it be that these depict the two different kinds of men who made up the royal entourage, western barons, and home-grown magnates, in an authentic way? There is other evidence that such was the social reality, albeit Marosi does not stress this.

Sándor Tóth does not share Marosi’s approach or conviction. He is ready to grant the width and depth of his perspective, and the striving for universality but cannot grasp why Marosi confronts art and the reality of the time, and what the reality of the time could possibly mean if not the way in which it is depicted. The real problem of interpretation is the recognition of qualities embedded in a concrete time and linked to a concrete function, as Marosi himself points out, but, according to Tóth, Marosi failed to recognise precisely this quality.

In the summer of 1997, as part of the first series of Franco-Hungarian intellectual encounters, Jacques Revel spoke about the late Alexandre (Sándor) Eckhardt, late Professor of French at the University of Budapest. In the collection of essays which Revel discussed, Eckhardt endeavoured to reconstruct the French image of Hungary. How did French and Hungarian culture interact as far back as the early middle ages and even in the imagined world of memory? Eckhardt’s methodology was kin to the most modern approach, he examined the genesis of national stereotypes, he traced the way ideas that had their origin in French culture were reformulated in Hungary, and the way a legend can become reality when it is translated from one environment to another.