The Psychopathology of Allusion in the Kádár Era

After his release from prison in 1963, Ferenc Mérei (1909–1986), a Hungarian psychologist and pedagogue, started working at the National Institute of Neurology and Mental Health (oie), where he and his colleagues established the foundations of Hungarian clinical psychology. The oie was a closed institution dealing with mentally ill patients living on the margins of society, but prisonization also affected the healthy staff. Mérei did not see this liminal situation as a twist of fate but as an opportunity: it was not synonymous with social exclusion but a kind of inverted status in which it was possible to develop a framework for truth-telling and authentic living. According to Victor Turner’s approach, people in a liminal state form communities and learn the implicit language that guarantees the conditions for truth-telling and protects truth-tellers from possible retaliation. Connotation is the key concept in this hermetic use of language, which, as Mérei writes, is “only a part of a hidden whole, known and understood only by the ‘accomplices,’ the ‘initiated’ […].” By examining the expressions, “informal rank,” “hiding kuruc,” “hiding college,” and “hiding school,” which often appear in Mérei’s works, we can observe that these were not only the key concepts of his life story but also the outlines of the social organization of the socialist era in Hungary. They are concepts of a non-democratic age in which “real life” in the moral sense and “real achievement” in the scientific sense were politically persecuted. In this approach, what is seen, read, heard, consumed, and publicly available is all just a false front; the true spirit is forced into opposition or moved underground. This framework refers to the Rákosi and Kádár eras, but at the same time, it opens up to us the meta-history of centuries of persecution.