How We Treat Ourselves – What the History of Psychology is Good for

Group-Psychology in Hungary, 1945–1986

This paper explores the way the context of psychology changed after 1945, during the decades of state-socialism, and how the discipline shaped the Hungarian psychotherapeutic field of the time. It also discusses the intellectual habitus of psychologists, including their visions on the aims and meanings of psychology. My analysis concentrates primarily on group psychotherapy. I made this choice because during the 1960s, group techniques imported from the West vastly contributed to the formation of the Hungarian professional field, and therefore, during this process, were adapted to its needs. Furthermore, the group psychotherapy of the 1960s offers us a lens to the process in which the psychotheapeutic field and terapeutic techniques mutually formed each other in a given social context, and it also exemplifies the fate of an imported technology in state-socialist Hungary which was originally developed according to the needs of Western societies.

Released: Replika 105, 53–68.
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