10/09/2025
“Psychoanalysis represents a powerful tool to help people work through their traumas, to enhance individual transformation and build an autonomous society based on individual liberty and social equality.” Excellent piece on the great Hungarian psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi, and his attempt to convince Freud of “the sociological significance of our analyses” - the intrinsic link between our inner and outer worlds.
The contribution of Sándor Ferenczi’s ideas to the critique of authoritarianism
By Eszter Salgó
According to Herbert Marcuse “psychoanalytic categories do not have to be ‘related’ to social and political conditions—they are themselves social and political categories” (1970). José Brunner (2001) and Peter Homans (1989) are among those who offer political readings of Freud’s writings. While the former puts to the fore Freud’s tendency to opt for authoritarian solutions, the latter considers psychoanalysis as part of the modernisation process that swept across the West. I will neither endorse nor contest these arguments.
The main purpose of this chapter is to provide a political reading of Sándor Ferenczi’s psychoanalytic theory and practice and explore the many ways through which Freud’s grand vizier expressed his refusal of all forms of authoritarianism and his call for a free and autonomous society. My argument is that the development of Ferenczi’s new methods is intimately linked to his disappointment not only with the classic Freudian technique, but also with the increasingly authoritarian nature of the various political regimes that succeeded each other in Hungary.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in Central Europe, writers, artists, and intellectuals were deeply involved in discussions on political and social issues. Many of them were driven by a progressive spirit, by the quest to emancipate Hungarian society from its feudal remnants, to modernise and democratise all aspects of national life.
Ferenczi was convinced that to understand social structures we needed to understand human nature. The same drives, survival, and pleasure impulses, “selfish” and “libidinal tendencies” (in other words, the 'panem et circenses' principle), shape both individuals’ feelings and behaviour and societies’ development (1914). According to him, physicians, and particularly psychiatrists, could play an active role in turning society towards being more free and autonomous.
In 1910, in his letter to Freud he highlights “the sociological significance of our analyses” where one can “investigate the real conditions in the various levels of society, cleansed of all hypocrisy and conventionalism, just as they are mirrored in the individual” (Fer/Fr, 22 March 1910, pp. 153–154). For the health of a society he attributes responsibility to children’s caregivers—“if there is a place where war can be defeated, without a doubt, it is the children’s room” (Kosztolányi, 1918)—and to political and social actors: “we may expect real progress only from the evolution of social organisations” (1914). He rejected the authoritarian rule of Franz Joseph, pointing out the senselessness of taking away from the individual more liberties than that which public interest demands.
From his standpoint, the relaxation of parental authoritarianism would not entail the destruction of the social order. If, instead of imposing dogmas in an authoritarian manner, people were allowed to exercise freely their faculty of independent judgment, a new social order could arise, which would not necessarily be based on the interests of a few powerful individuals only (Ferenczi, 1914).
At the end of August 1918, Freud was harbouring the hope of establishing the centre of the international psychoanalytic movement in Budapest; and for this reason, he paved the way for Ferenczi’s nomination to the presidency of the IPA. The arrival to power of the communist Béla Kun regime (21 March 1919) brought new nominations for Ferenczi: he became a university professor and was asked to give birth to a public clinic. While these were times in Hungary when it was getting more and more complicated to stay out of politics and/or to remain neutral, Ferenczi did his best to preserve his intellectual and moral liberty. As he wrote to Freud on 13 April 1919: “Ψα. is being courted on all sides; it is costing me an effort to defend myself against the solicitations. But yesterday I was unable to avoid a direct invitation to take over a section of a state hospital” (Fer/Fr).
The decision of some members of the Hungarian Psychoanalytic Society to play an active political role in the new regime had contradictory effects on the movement (Fer/Fr, May 1919, p. 357): ‘My fervent wish to legitimize Ψα. and my didactic intentions at the university has [sic] been brought to fruition all too stormily through the somewhat adventurous politics of Dr. Radó. I hope I will succeed in keeping Ψα. free of all political tendencies at all times ... The Hungarian Society is working less promptly since Radó has been inundated with state business.’
A month later Ferenczi laments the emergence of a “small coalition” of regime-friendly psychoanalysts led by Radó and Révész, increasingly upset with him. The source of their anger is that “[b]oth are somewhat intoxicated by the grandiose personal successes that they have to register in the new era and are dissatisfied with my—for them all too temperate— manner” (Fer/Fr, June 1919).
The fall of the Béla Kun government (31 July 1919) and the inauguration of the Horthy regime signified the end of Ferenczi’s academic career—he was fired from the university and from the Hungarian Association of Medical Doctors and became more and more marginalised in the international movement, getting replaced as IPA president in 1920 by Ernest Jones. In the same year, the peace treaty following the end of the First World War deprived Hungary of sixty-seven per cent of its territory, generating what became known as Hungarian society’s painful “Trianon trauma”.
The new right-wing government transformed this collective distress into a foundation myth (promising the resurrection of St Stephen’s Great Hungary) as a means to legitimise its (authoritarian) power. Ferenczi described the violence inflicted on some segments of the population by the regime as follows: ‘After the unbearable “Red terror,” which lay heavy on one’s spirit like a nightmare, we now have the White one … the ruthless clerical-anti-Semitic spirit seems to have eked out a victory. If everything does not deceive, we Hungarian Jews are now facing a period of brutal persecution of Jews. They will, I think, have cured us in a very short time of the illusion with which we were brought up, namely, that we are “Hungarians of Jewish faith”. I picture Hungarian anti-Semitism—commensurate with the national character—to be more brutal than the petty-hateful type of the Austrians … Personally, one will have to take this trauma as an occasion to abandon certain prejudices brought along from the nursery and to come to terms with the bitter truth of being, as a Jew, really without a country.’ (Fer/Fr, 28 August 1919, pp. 365–366)
Notwithstanding the humiliations and the deepening sense of solitude, unlike other members of the Society who emigrated, Ferenczi did not follow Freud’s advice to withdraw his libido from his country (Fr/Fer, 27 October 1918, pp. 304–305), and he remained in Hungary.
During the communist era it was impossible for Ferenczi to express openly his political views in articles or even in private letters. Censorship, he lamented, had a paralysing effect on him: “I … curse the impediments which prevent me from talking everything out … in these times” (Fer/Fr, 13 April 1919, pp. 346–347). On 23 May 1919, the “rare opportunity” of sending an “almost uncensored letter” generated excitement in him and prompted him “to write in the kind of detail in which I haven’t been able to report to you in months” (Fer/Fr, 23 May 1919, pp. 355–358). Yet just a month later he gives voice again to his “longing for some freedom” (Fer/Fr, 29 June 1919, pp. 361–363).
Disenchanted after the negative experience of academic life and seeking also to provide an explanation (or self-justification), in an article published in 1922 in the Nyugat magazine, he unveils the hypocrisy of authoritarian regimes in supporting certain innovative and marginalised intellectual, cultural, or scientific groups, and their underlying political motivations.
His ideal form of good government remains what he conceptualised in 1908 as “socialist individualism”—a political system that would respect and safeguard the natural differences between individuals, guarantee a balance between people’s lust for independence and happiness on the one hand, and the necessary restrictions by society on the other, in other words, a political system that would reconcile individual liberty and social equality.
In two manuscripts (probably written in 1920, identified and analysed by Ferenc Erős) Ferenczi highlights the reasons why psychoanalysis doesn’t have much in common with the “partly paranoid partly infantile visions” of Marxism, communism, or anarchism and why it has more to do with Durkheim’s theories (Erős, 2013). He draws a parallel between sublimation and social progress and emphasises that his policy proposals are “liberal socialism” and “political democracy”—models towards which the route leads through psychoanalysis (Erős, 2013).
From the beginning of the 1920s onwards, Ferenczi preferred to express his political views indirectly, rather than through open statements. His political views, his rejection of authoritarianism and quest for liberty, become visible in the way he reorganised the Hungarian Psychoanalytic Society and how he reinvented psychoanalytic technique.
Psychoanalysis served as a tool through which the hidden and unutterable could be brought to light and put into words, through which personal and social traumas could be mourned. If the structure of the international psychoanalytic “movement”, between 1910 and 1930, reflected the authoritarian atmosphere of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and of its successor states, as André Haynal claims (1988), we could argue that the Hungarian circle mirrored its members’ refusal of their country’s repressive atmosphere, and their adherence to liberal and democratic values.
Ferenczi accomplished what he yearned for in the early 1910s: the group he created was devoid of a father figure endowed with dogmatic authority; what kept the members of the movement together in their refusal of the authoritative government was mother-type feelings.
In the 1920s, psychoanalysis in Hungary assumed an inclusive, human, tolerant, and open character. Instead of replicating Freud’s “secret societies”, Ferenczi, thanks to his innovative and liberal personality, acted as a “plenary man” (Mészáros, 2008) and managed to transform the Society into a democratically functioning multidisciplinary workshop. During the same period (from the early 1920s) Ferenczi “democratised” the technique of psychoanalysis.
His new method was based on multidirectional processes of interpersonal and intersubjective elements. His vision of countertransference redefined psychoanalysis as a system of interactive communication, a “relationship-based” process (Haynal, 2002), as a form of playing (Frankel, 2011).
It is mainly, though, the elaboration and the use of his new technique and his trauma theory that we can identify Ferenczi’s symbolic acting-out of his intellectual and affective involvement in social and political issues. It is in this indirect and veiled manner that he attempted to communicate his refusal of the authoritarian and repressive power structures, his rejection of the Horthy regime based on hypocrisy and conformism, and to mourn the lost mother(land).
Only in coded language could he express his eagerness to foster the emergence of a democratic system characterised by authenticity and freedom, where a “maternal” political elite would guarantee a “facilitating environment” in a Winnicottian sense, allowing Hungarians to work through their collective traumas and live a creative and, in the broadest sense, a playful life. It thus seems appropriate to depict Ferenczi’s new way of thinking and working as part of his resistance to the loss of hope for democracy, as an attempt to respond both critically and constructively not just to an individual but also to a socio-historical sense of alienation.
Ferenczi’s writings are of great relevance for political and social scientists (see also Salgó, 2014). He anticipated Donald Winnicott, for whom, in a truly democratic country, “there is a sufficient maturity in the emotional development of sufficient proportion of the individuals that comprise it for there to exist an innate tendency towards the creation and recreation and maintenance of the democratic machinery” (1950), and Béla Hamvas, who pointed out that whether a situation evolves in the right or in the wrong direction depends on people’s psychological maturity (1943).
István Bibó (1942–43) perhaps drew on (Hungarian?) psychoanalytic theories when designing a parallel between a society’s and an individual’s reactions to traumatic situations. He might have had Ferenczi’s trauma theories in mind when describing a society that is experiencing a “collective hysteria” as a paralysed society losing contact with itself, failing in its problem-solving function and rejecting the real world by conjuring up an illusory world, and generating omnipotent fantasies.
Jonathan Lear aptly proposed the following question: “Might it not be possible to expand our understanding of ethical life to take account of the fact that human beings live with unconscious motivations?” (1999). Back in 1908 Ferenczi harboured a similar dilemma. At the Salzburg conference of the IPA he claimed that psychoanalysis could serve as a tool against authoritarian rule, that it could enhance in people an internal liberation, helping them get rid of the constraints posed by a restrictive upbringing based on hypocrisy and by a similarly repressive social milieu. In his interpretation, in political revolutions, coercive tools pass from one leadership to another.
Only individuals’ inner transformation represents a real revolution able to bring relief to people; only people liberated through psychoanalysis could prevent the return of authoritarianism (Edu) and lead to an era in which hypocrisy, the blind adulation of dogmas and authority and the absence of self-criticism, would belong to the past (1911).
To deal with societies’ discontents it is necessary to deal with people’s individual malaise. For societies to progress, individuals must undergo an internal transformation. Ferenczi’s thoughts resonate with those of Cornelius Castoriadis. For this Greek psychoanalyst and philosopher, in psychoanalysis, in pedagogy, and in politics the goal should be to enhance individuals’ ability to live an autonomous and creative life, instead of calling for the emergence of a fear-less, hatred-less, utopian, and therefore necessarily authoritarian society. As Castoriadis outlines, one of the paradoxical aspects of the “impossibility” of politics is that there can be no democracy without democratic individuals (and vice versa) (1997).
We could conclude by suggesting that Sándor Ferenczi, using various tools, sought to convey the message that a) to understand politics we must understand human nature and focus our attention on individuals (and not only on institutions); b) we must recognise (and heal) the psychological and emotional damage that societies experiencing authoritarianism suffer(ed); c) the “violently excessive goodness”, the “eat-bird-or-die policy” (Diary, p. 154) which forces people to introject the aggressor, to subordinate themselves like “mechanical, obedient automatons” (Conf, p. 163) to the political leadership’s will and gratify their desires, should be resisted; d) hypocrisy favours the endurance (or return) of authoritarianism while authenticity and playfulness are conducive to democratic politics; and e) psychoanalysis represents a powerful tool to help people work through their traumas, to enhance individual transformation and build an autonomous society based on individual liberty and social equality.
Not only do Ferenczi’s thoughts help us better understand the causes and the effects of authoritarianism, they also represent a fruitful ground for political scientists and policymakers to rethink the “model” of the democratisation process, reject the transition paradigm (the theory according to which countries leaving behind authoritarian rule move necessarily toward democracy), and adopt instead an interdisciplinary and individual-centred approach in the study of societies and political systems."
From Eszter Salgó's chapter in 'Ferenczi’s Influence on Contemporary Psychoanalytic Traditions' (Routledge, 2018). To find out more about the book, please click here: https://www.karnacbooks.com/product/ferenczi/40857/
