European Yearbook of the History of Psychology

The Spanish psychologist Miquel Siguan wrote in his biography that he never considered himself a psychologist in the strict sense (Siguan, 1984). He had a broad intellectual background and both entertained a constant interest and worked in different fields including philosophy, sociology, history and pedagogy. During his career, he would become one of the key figures in the history of psychology in Spain. He was part of a small group of psychologists who managed to institutionalize the discipline in the country after the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). In 1962 he became Professor of Psychology at the University of Barcelona and in the years that followed he was decisive in establishing and designing the degree in psychology at that university. At the beginning of his career he published on migration within post-war Spain, industrial psychology, and projective tests. Yet today, his later work on bilingualism is more widely known, especially among psychologists and psycholinguists. Throughout his life, Siguan contributed significantly to psychology in Spain, which was going through a disrupted and decisive period in its history. This article contains: a short, contextualized biography; a presentation of some of Siguan’s early contributions during the Franco regime and an overall assessment of his approach and personal memoir of this historical figure.

This paper aims to present how mental testing has been introduced in Hungary. Interest of local experts in child psychology was fed by both the international development of psychology and practical problems of education. Adaptation of Binet-Simon test was carried out with the contribution of the most prominent representatives of Hungarian psychology and pedagogy. Although the introduction of mental testing had its practical benefits in education, debates about the nature of intelligence did not reach a standstill. Hungarian psychologists claimed that quantitative assessment of intelligence does not reflect the complexity and individuality of human mind.

The paper explores the opportunities and characteristics of early women psychoanalysts in Hungary. It discusses the increasing presence of women, analyzing its possible roots, and explores the social background, education, professional positions, and fields of research of women analysts. It tries to interpret the role of gender in their personal and professional identity, as well as the influence of other social and professional factors on their life and work. The study also examines women analysts’ views of the subject of femininity, female sexuality or the mother-child relationship. After a social-historical overview, the paper presents the life course of a few significant early Hungarian women psychoanalysts.

During the period 1960-2010 Hungary went through important social and political changes. Initially these changes had meant for psychology that via the softening of the dictatorship social and human sciences and supportive professions were allowed to (re)appear in the system, and later on psychology and its applications could be diversified. Since the dramatic political changes in 1990, psychology has become a central player. This paper concentrates on institutional developments, using mainly public data.

The training of psychologists restarted in 1963 with an integration of applied fields into a 5-year program. This was soon followed by a more theory based reorganization in the 1970s with the formation of a postgraduate system of applied training. Between 1960 and 2010 the single Budapest Eötvös Loránd University with a dozen students was replaced by 7 training universities with a Bologna 3+2-year system, with 800 new undergraduates and 300 MA students each year. This was accompanied by the formation of a PhD system.

Regarding research, the most important change in the 1960s was the formation of the Research Institute for Psychology at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, with a strong psychophysiology and social psychology profile. From the 1970s on, research has become more and more important at the universities. A notable general change was the appearance of project based financing.

In publication practices Westernization appeared first in citations, and from the 1980s it appeared also in publications.

The paper analyses how social psychology developed in Hungary, in connection with the reinstallation and institutionalization of psychology in the 1960s. It concentrates on the works and activities of the most influential figures in the history of modern social psychology in the country: Ferenc Mérei and Ferenc Pataki. They both represented the collectivistic approach to their discipline. While Mérei, for political reasons, remained in a marginal position in academic life, it was Pataki, who achieved ideological legitimation of social psychology in the face of political leadership. The paper outlines the international context of these developments, and the ultimate failure of Pataki to maintain the balance between scientific quality and ideological pressure.

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.