On Struggle, Survival and Psychoanalysis: The Budapest Polyclinic in the 1930s

In this paper, I look at the Budapest Polyclinic in the 1930s, one of the first free clinics of psychoanalysis, and I discuss its institutional struggles, which are important for a broader conversation on the boundaries of psychoanalysis, on the status of lay analysis, on money and the fee in psychoanalysis, and on the issue of practising psychoanalysis in a time of oppression and political unfreedom. Drawing on original archival material and on press coverage of the time, I capture the moment of emergence of the Budapest Polyclinic, but also a telling exchange of official letters on the status of lay analysts, taking place between the members of the Hungarian Psychoanalytical Society (and of the Budapest Polyclinic) and the Hungarian Ministry of Social Welfare. Happening in a moment of crisis and upsurge of fascism, in 1926 and after, this exchange shows the kinds of contestations that psychoanalysts in Budapest were met with, in their effort to open training to non-medically trained practitioners and to create a free psychoanalytic clinic. Officials in Hungary question psychoanalysis as ‘not a science’, susceptible of ‘sexual saturation’, and as having ‘an arousing effect on laymen’. Psychoanalysts in Budapest respond with a letter-manifesto that defends the interdisciplinarity and autonomy of psychoanalysis, that situates it among other scientific discourses, and that also argues for the social mission of psychoanalysis. Ultimately, I trace infrastructural and institutional currents that animated psychoanalysis since its very beginning. I look at the concentric crises that psychoanalysis was bound to operate in and I ask questions about resilience and infrastructural invention.