This book explores how the
Budapest School of Psychoanalysis took shape, and in particular examines the role played in it by
Sándor Ferenczi, Freud's closest friend and associate. It asks what the significance of this intellectual grouping held for the evolution of modern psychoanalytic theory and practice, and how the defining moments of early twentieth-century Hungarian and European politics impacted on both psychoanalysis and the analysts themselves. It also explores the importance in these pivotal times of the Emergency Committee on Relief and Immigration, an organisation formed in 1938 by the American Psychoanalytic Association.
This book raises many questions and demonstrates through the emigration of the Budapest psychoanalysts how the threat of destruction can draw people together from across continents. Indeed, American psychoanalysts had set aside considerations of professional achievement and rivalry to assist their peers forced to flee European Nazism. In collaboration with the International Psychoanalytical Association, the Emergency Committee not only rescued lives, but also enriched our intellectual heritage as it salvaged seminal cultural and scholarly resources, which influenced the development of psychoanalysis in our time.
