This book follows the personal and professional journeys of three Jewish women from Budapest, originally classmates in the same high school. The book shows how they and their families were marked by the Shoah, and explores the impact of the social, cultural and political milieu in which they travelled upon their development as psychoanalysts.
Following an introduction by the Hungarian psychoanalyst, Judit Meszaros, who gives a broad historical review of Hungarian Jewry during the Shoah and the Soviet era, the three authors provide autobiographical accounts of their own psychoanalytic evolution and interconnectedness. They describe their motivations for emigrating from Hungary, their early struggles to fit in and their eventual acculturation. The authors explore their coming of age as clinicians in their adopted homelands, and explain how their theoretical orientation and clinical styles were shaped by their respective analytic environments, their training experiences and their own personal histories. They offer clinical vignettes to illustrate their respective psychoanalytic perspective. The book closes with an afterword from American psychoanalyst, Adrienne Harris, who contemplates the authors' immigration experiences alongside her own.
Replete with personal, cultural and political history, this book will prove both informative and fascinating for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists as well as the general public.
About the Author: Veronica Csillag is faculty, training and supervising analyst at the Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis; faculty at the National Institute for the Psychotherapies, and associate editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues. She is the author of several psychoanalytic papers, which were published in a variety of journals. She is in private practice in New York City.
Katalin Lanczi was born in Budapest, emigrated to the UK in 1980, is a fellow of the British Psychoanalytic Society, co-director of the European Psychoanalytic Film Festival, lectures and teaches widely, and is also in full-time psychoanalytic practice.
Julianna Vamos was born in Budapest and studied in Paris (Sorbonne Paris 5) for a PhD in clinical psychology and psychopathology. She is a psychoanalyst and member of the Société Psychoanalytique de Paris (SPP).
