Zsolt K. Horváth. <i>Mérei Ferenc I–II</i> [Ferenc Mérei, vols. 1–2]

When Zsolt K. Horváth embarked on writing a social biography of Ferenc Mérei, he faced a twofold challenge. First, in order to understand how the very different layers of Mérei’s life influenced each other, it was essential to have a thorough understanding of the various political and cultural contexts of twentieth-century Hungary. Born in Budapest in 1909, Mérei was soon involved in the avant-garde movement of Lajos Kassák, which also brought him into contact with the relatively broad spectrum of left-wing political thought. Although he spent most of the 1930s in Paris, where he studied psychology and education with Henri Wallon, he returned to Budapest before the outbreak of the war and was conscripted into the labor service. After 1945 he continued his research into child development and also became a key political figure in the building of socialist public education in the late 1940s. But in 1950 the Hungarian Stalinist leadership had lost confidence in him and dismissed him. In 1958 he was arrested and imprisoned for political reasons. After his release in 1963, he was not allowed to return to politics, but his informal power remained considerable: Mérei was associated with the highest level of nonacademic training in psychology, and through his secret intellectual circle, Törzs (tribe), he continued to play a significant role in the intellectual elite until he died in 1986.Second, there have been several attempts to write Mérei’s biography, but these narratives have relied heavily on myths formulated by his students, friends, and opponents, as well as by Mérei himself.1 The task, therefore, was not only to find the sources of his life and to create a story that took into account changing historical circumstances but also to deconstruct the existing oral and written myths about his life. For this purpose, instead of focusing on the history of the “self,” Horváth’s biography scrutinizes the history of the social forms and political practices of the twentieth century that led Mérei to certain professional, personal, and political decisions.The biography is in two volumes. This division is justified by the internal logic of the work, as well as the fact that it is over 1,000 pages long. The first volume, entitled Peremhelyzet és a remény szocializmusa [Liminality and the socialism of hope], covers the first 36 years of Mérei’s life, up to 1945, in five chapters. The main purpose of these chapters is to trace how differently Mérei perceived formal education in the prestigious secondary schools of Budapest and informal socialization in avant-garde and left-wing movements (e.g., Kassák’s Munka Kör [worker’s circle] in Budapest and the Hungarian wing of the French Communist Party in Paris) and, after his return from Paris, in Lipót Szondi’s laboratory. While Mérei struggled with the formalized conditions of the school, he could easily relate to the norm of the avant-garde community, which was based on the experiential acquisition of knowledge. According to Horváth, Mérei’s academic interest in socialization, which could be defined as implicit learning within a community, stemmed from this experience.In psychological literature, Mérei is known for emphasizing implicit learning and group processes in shaping behavior. What was new, however, is the importance that the psychologist attached to them, not only in his research and treatment of patients at the National Institute of Neurology and Psychiatry (ONI) from the 1960s onward but also in his private life. These strategies, derived from his avant-garde lifestyle and left-wing political socialization, enabled him to survive and maintain his agency in the face of social repression and political attacks. In these chapters, Horváth also challenges existing theories of Jewish assimilation by showing that preservation of faith and conscious assimilation were not the only strategies adopted by Hungarian Jews.While the first volume treats the different periods of Mérei’s life in roughly equal length, the second volume, entitled Szocialista felvilágosodás és törzsi avantgárd [Socialist enlightenment and tribal avant-garde], concentrates mainly on a few years of the psychologist’s biography, such as 1945–50, 1954–58, and 1963. In analyzing these periods, the advantages of Horváth’s method of separating and contextualizing the different layers of Mérei’s life (e.g., his political and professional career, his health, and his family) become clear. This method allows the author to show how the psychologist’s exclusion from politics and the political climate of the Mátyás Rákosi era led to a personal valorization of his own liminal position and his relations within informal communities in the early 1950s, and then how this led him to develop a professional interest in the concept of the community from the 1960s onward.By analyzing these layers of biographical space, the author also shows that certain life events had a different meaning than one might expect. The year 1950, for example, proved to be more of a turning point for the psychologist than the Holocaust, which threatened his very existence. In 1950, it became clear to him that the grassroots-leftist thinking he had believed in since his youth and that had shaped his way of life could not be implemented in state political practice. Apart from the political and social context, his increasingly frequent seizures and the steady deterioration of his health are often cited in the analysis as the background to Mérei’s decisions. This part of the book is particularly interesting because it illustrates how an individual’s changing physical condition cannot be separated from his social functioning and the agency he has over his own life.As the political and social transformations of the twentieth century had a significant impact on the construction of Mérei’s identity and career choices, Horváth succeeds in pointing out the shortcomings of important historiographical metanarratives, for example, on social inequality, Jewish identity, repression, and the forms and meanings of social opposition. Furthermore, the book manages to reframe the question of Pavlovization, which offered a new conceptual framework for all the psy-sciences (psychiatry, pedagogy, and psychology), often discussed in the international literature on the history of science. Recent publications on Soviet psychiatry argue that attempts to implement Pavlov’s concepts should not be seen as a mere politicization of science but as a way of seeking a solid scientific basis for psychiatry.2 Finding this basis was also one of the major questions of “Western” psychiatry at the time. Mental problems were more difficult to explain in the rational context of medicine than other diseases, and as a result psychiatry was a less respected branch of medicine. Pavlov’s ideas, which were widely accepted at the time, were able to integrate both physiological and social explanations for mental problems. The introduction of physiological and reflexological knowledge into Soviet psychiatry was therefore important not only for the rituals of knowledge production but also for the rationalization of hitherto unexplained phenomena.In contrast to this argumentation, the biography reveals that in the case of Hungarian pedagogy—which was also included in the psy-sciences but had a different scientific and social position from psychiatry—Pavlovization rather meant the elimination of some forms of knowledge. Although these erased elements of scientific discourse did not contradict Marxist principles, they mobilized Western theories and rational argumentation that were unacceptable in the existing political climate. In other words, Mérei’s work was deemed to be incompatible with the rituals of knowledge production in Stalinist Hungary because it was based on scientific rationality and empirical research, not on dogmatic political revelation.The great advantage of this work is that it allows us to see the political and social processes of the twentieth century from the bottom up, through the biography of Ferenc Mérei. However, Horváth is not content with reconstructing what it was like to be a Hungarian student in Paris in the 1930s; a politician in the emerging dictatorship a decade later; one of the key figures of the most important informal workshop, the so-called Pszichoterápiás hétvége [Psychotherapeutic weekend]; and the driver of the reinstitutionalization of Hungarian psychology in the 1960s. His analysis combines empirical material, literature, and philosophy with the key theories of the social sciences (Michel Foucault, Michel de Certeau, Victor Turner, etc.). A translation of this work into English and its publication would deliver a high-quality interpretation of twentieth-century Hungarian history to an international audience.

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