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Category Archives: Refugees

‘Vera Roboz was a follower of Szondi…’

07 Sunday Apr 2019

Posted by Christine in 1930s, Melbourne, Refugees

≈ 1 Comment

Vera Roboz, nee Groak, is listed as an Australian psychoanalyst in the online dictionary of women psychoanalysts, Psychoanalytikerinnen: Biografisches Lexikon. The web-page Geni shows that Vera to have been born in Budapest in 1912, the third and youngest child and only daughter of Erno Groak, a prominent physician and Irma Groak, nee Pollatstek. Vera’s brother, Bela, born in 1901 and, also a physician, perished in the Ukraine in 1943. Irma Groak and Gyula Groak also died during the war years.Vera and her husband Pal Roboz emigrated to Australia via Vienna in 1957  following the Hungarian uprising against Russians. At that time Pal Roboz was a leading paediatrician in Budapest and Vera, the head of the Department of Criminal Psychology at the Remedial Teacher’s college in Budapest. ( Boros: et al; Psychology and Criminal Justice…)

The Lexicon entry  mentions that Vera Groak was a follower of Leopold Szondi, a psychologist whose theory of fate analysis was predicated on intergenerational transmission of a familial unconscious. Szondi seems to have provided an alternative theory of development to that of Freud and Jung, a third based upon the notion of a familial unconscious.

So who was Szondi?

My account here is drawn from an internet search, and an exploration of Youtube… I am open to correction here and apologize for errors. My acquaintance with Szondi is very new. I have put links to the sources I have used.

Leopold Szondi ( 1898 -1984) was a Hungarian born psychologist and the creator of Fate Analysis and the Szondi Test, a projective test akin to the Rorscharch test. For Szondi human fate is  constituted by the elements as self-, character-, social-, mental-, spiritual- fate. In a short account of Szondi’s life, Dr. Enikő Gy. Kiss from the University of Pecs, notes that”Szondi’s   theory of object choice – „ object choice guided by the ancestors”-, which he later named genotropism, was published in 1937.

Szondi ‘came to the concept of genotropism through the discovery of the choice of illnesses. In pursuance of the research they have gathered data of a thousand child and their fifteen thousand relatives. The examination of family trees had helped him realize the similarities between illnesses amongst the families of spouses. According to his observations the traumas and sicknesses were often the consequences of the familial genotype and not due to other factors. This way the familial heredity is responsible for the sickness of the primarily weak organ. In Szondi’s concept, not only the choice of illnesses but also the choice of occupation, spouses and friends is also due to its familial heredity. These thoughts have lead to the notion of the familial unconsciousness, which is rooted in the latent familial heredity everyone carries along. The familial unconsciousness appears in our choices, and according to Szondi’s concept, our fate is a continuous line of the choices we make”.( Kiss).

Vera Groak appears to have  joined Szondi’s laboratory shortly around the time of the publication of his work “Analysis of Marriages in 1937. An attempt at a theory of choice in love.’ This work even made it into a Sydney based Australian paper called ‘The World’s News’ in 1940. Szondi did not get much publicity in Australia in 1940. News from Europe was hard to get by then. The war was underway.

However the journalist explained it thus:

Dr. Szondy holds that real harmony and understanding between two persons, particularly those who are married to each other and must consequently betogether all or most of the year, year after year, are possible only when the couple belong to the same Instinct Group. That is, they must have suffered through experience or vicariously the same hurts and pains. They must have similar sympathies for those things and
persons to whom sympathy is due. They  must have the same biological urges and psychological suppressions and complexes. And they must have come into the world with the same intuitive instincts, which can only come through genetic inheritance from their forebears. The last is most important of all.

 

Others in Vera’s group were Ferenc Mérei, Klári Sándor, György Garai, Zsuzsa Kőrösi and Imre  Molnar. Her future husband, Pal Roboz, a paediatrician also joinedSzondi’s  laboratory and the work with disabled children. The training program also involved psychoanalytic treatment, exploring with the patient the meaning of his object and life choices. The intention of freeing the patient from the constraints of  familial unconscious patterns down generations to greater freedom of choice…

In 1944 Szondi went from Hungary to Belsen on the Kastner train. The original intention was for the train to go straight to Switzerland but it was diverted to Belsen where the passengers remained for six months. Eventually after negotiations with Eichmann a ransom was paid for him and the other 1300 odd passengers. The train eventually ended its journey in Switzerland. Szondi lived in Zurich for the remainder of this life.Vera Groak Roboz and her husband appear to have remained in Hungary.

In later life Szondi recorded an interview with Jaques Schott,  which can be found here. It’s interesting viewing, ( with a transcription in German and then. for me, into English, with the aid of an online translation feature)  not least for Szondi’s description of his life’s work. He also remarks upon the criticism he received about his rather Calvinistic approach… implying a sort of asceticism and attempt at anonymity. Overall though, it is an interesting story.

Miss L’s Dream Diary – Seeking ‘Dr W’.

10 Sunday May 2015

Posted by Christine in 1940s, Diaries and Source material, Refugees, WW2

≈ 4 Comments

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1945, consultations with a psychoanalyst, diaries as historical sources, dreams, end of war, grief, immigration, Kristallnacht, relief, resettlement, the experience of German Jews in London during ww2, trauma

Once in a while in the business of researching and writing history a rare document emerges from the archive boxes. Such items are the products of serendipity; the result of a decision made by their author, or someone, that it should be preserved. Writing in the 1940s, the French Historian and then member of the Resistance, Marc Bloch, drew my attention to such moments. The archives we rely upon for historical understanding are built from such off-the-cuff decisions and accidents – and from the systematic collation of records that are part of bureaucratic life. To read the thoughts and ideas of people who were alive in times past is  to read of our formation. These thoughts and dreams, however recorded, are the beginning of understanding. Poetry, novels, theatre and art are their interpretation. So, too, is the writing of history.

Recently I was given a box of documents collated and packed by an elderly woman, whom I shall call ‘Miss L’. She has since gone into full-time care, her mind lost to Alzheimer’s Disease. It is clear Miss L thought carefully about what was to be kept and what was thrown away. Along with the usual documents: degrees, certificates, bank records, letters and photographs there are two diaries – both kept during the 1940s when she was consulting a psychoanalyst in London. One of them follows the course of her consultations with the analyst, referred to as ‘Dr W’. The other is a dream diary, a record of nightly dreams kept during this period. Most of these dreams hold  images of her daily life and interactions with members of her family and lovers. Others are threaded with images of death and violence at the hands of the Nazis in the years before the war broke out. In others, still, she is addressing ‘Him’, her analyst, on one occasion admonishing him for not listening. Sometimes she makes a joke of him, wondering whether psychoanalysis is of value – at least to the patient. Miss L has a story to tell and conflicts to unravel. She wants and needs him to listen.

Miss L is a German Jew. During her childhood she lived near Nuremberg, the youngest of a wealthy family. Her father, a merchant, had fought in the Great War and was awarded the Iron Cross for his services. Like many of his Jewish contemporaries who were similarly awarded, he believed this would protect him from the worst excesses of the Nazis as they came to power in the 1930s. Five days after Kristallnacht in November 1938, Miss L’s father took his own life. She and her mother escaped Germany early in 1939, eventually arriving in England after travelling through Switzerland.

Miss L’s dream diary reflects her larger internal process of emigration and resettlement, from danger to safety. She speaks to her analyst of leaving one country behind but, after several years, still not settled in another. Her dreams are of murder and death. It is not unlikely she was witness to such events, if she did not hear about them from others. She also dreams of losing her identity documents on a train a reference, perhaps, to a period where she was stateless.

After her arrival in London she  experienced rejection by members of the English Jewish community because of her German origins. ‘I was not served in a shop, she tells her analyst.  In later life she recalled how much more devastated she was by this rejection by the English Jews than she had been in Germany during the years when Jews were increasingly deprived of their rights, property and wealth. Miss L eventually anglicised her name and worked hard to become British – even more so than the British. She appears to have been very much helped by Dr W. For it was after her work with him that she went to university to study for a career that would help restore the family fortune lost to the war. Miss L did not necessarily aspire to Law but eventually made a significant contribution to it.

During her analysis with Dr W, Miss L recorded her dreams on a daily basis throughout 1944 into 1945. I will transcribe two: the first because it tells us just how much she had to bear. These were the experiences and memories from which she tried to protect her children. Earlier in the analysis she had dreamed of being told not to speak. But in her conscious selection of this document for the archive box, she has I believe, expressed the wish that these experiences be known. When I read this dream, I wept.

When I read the second dream for the first time I had the feeling I had read it somewhere before. Perhaps in a case study somewhere deep in the psychoanalytic literature…? I record it now because if I am right, this may identify Dr W. Perhaps someone else has read it, remembers it and may know where it has been published. Or perhaps I have imagined reading it.  Suffice to say it is Miss L’s dream.

Dream 1. Tues 2 May 1945.

[Two girls] have offended against some rule of their school and I am told they will both be executed for it. I think it is monstrous. I want to tell everybody about this and do something against it, but I  hear the headmistress did not waste a minute, and they are already dead. I meet a man who worked in my father’s office and he is coming from the execution. I go up to him and start crying but try not to. I say to him ‘I am sorry. I did not mean to cry, but this is just too much’.  I go out to see [a lady], she must be in despair [I think]. The girls were the only thing she had in life. I find her together with some other women each of whom has lost a son. She is quite calm. They all talk about their children.

Dream 2. Sunday 20 May 1945

Mother says we are going to buy some black material for a dress for me at a certain shop in Nuremberg. I am rather thrilled. I haven’t bought any material for years. I leave the house and walk along a street in Nuremberg. There is a beautiful warm shine of light from [ a building she names but is indecipherable]. Before it was bombed the light never shone right through. It is lovelier than ever.

Round the church and the street there are rows of dead bodies of American soldiers. Some are wrapped up in brown paper and string, they must be really dead. One who was lying against a house opposite the church gets up and shows me the way to the shops and I talk to him. I remember that I never told mother I was going out but when I get near the shop I meet her and my aunt with a man in a dark uniform. He has very dark deep set eyes and a rather taut face. He seems much more interesting to me than my guide , who is rather fat and jovial.

The War had ended on 8 May 1945.

References:

Marc Bloch,( c.1944).  The Historians Craft, Oxford, 1971.

Louise London, (2000) Whitehall and the Jews, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

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