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1882
Volume 3, Issue 1
  • ISSN: 2295-5267
  • E-ISSN: 2507-0304

Abstract

Abstract

After 1945, most Hungarian psychologists and psychiatrists formed their own professional identity, lagging behind and catching up with Western colleagues and their achievements. According to the analogy taken from the literature of post colonialism, the ‘developed West’ and the geopolitical dependency on the West (or competition during the cold war) is a fundamental point of reference for Eastern European collective identities. Taking Western social phenomena out of context, interpreting them as the end point of an ‘universal’ phylogeny and thus internalizing the ‘inferiority’ of their respective cultures are the cornerstones of self-colonizing identity. The paper shows how the status and the ideological role of the ‘West’ and Western psychology changed during different periods of Hungarian state-socialism; how the East-West (or ‘capitalist’-‘socialist’) dichotomy shaped the interpretation of intellectual roles for Hungarian psychologists, their ideas about the ‘aims’ of psychology, as well as the organization of professional communities. This perspective offers the opportunity to rethink what purpose an examination of the history of Eastern European psychology may serve; what kind of epistemological and methodological viewpoints may emerge when self-colonialization is the object of the analysis and not its perspective.

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2017-01-01
2025-12-15

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