Lost Childhood and the Language of Exile

Judit Szekacs-Weisz, PhD, is a bilingual psychoanalyst and psychotherapist – a double citizen both in her professional and private life. Born and educated (mostly) in Budapest, Hungary, she has taken in the way of thinking and ideas of Ferenczi, the Balints, Hermann, and Rajka as an integral part of a "professional mother tongue". Founding Member of the Sàndor Ferenczi Society, Budapest. The experience of living and working in a totalitarian regime and the transformatory years leading to the fall of the Berlin Wall sensitised her to the social and individual aspects of trauma, identity formation and strategies of survival. In 1990, she moved to London, where, with a small group of psychoanalysts, therapists, artists and social scientists, she founded Imago East-West and later the Multilingual Psychotherapy Centre (MLPC) to create a space where diverse experiences of living and changing context and language in different cultures can be explored and creative solutions found. In 2001 she organised, together with Kathleen Kelley-Lainé and Judith Mészáros, the Lost Childhood Conferences in Budapest, London and Paris She writes about body-and-mind, trauma, emigration, changing context and social dreaming.Ivan Ward is the former Director of Education at the Freud Museum, where his work variously involved teaching student groups in the museum and managing the Public Programme of conferences and lectures. He has published a number of papers on the application of psychoanalytic ideas to social theory, and was editor of Ideas in Psychoanalysis, a series of short books which explain psychoanalytic concepts in relation to the everyday world. He is the author of Introducing Psychoanalysis (2000), Phobia (2002) and Castration (2003) published by Icon Books. Previous conference publications include The Psychology of Nursery Education (1998) and The Presentation of Case Material in Clinical Practice (1997).

‘This remarkable compendium on “loss” contains essays that are amongst the most moving and deeply reflective accounts of all the different types of loss we can undergo, whether it be the loss of one’s country, one’s mother tongue, or that loss we must all endure: the loss of our childhood. Although the book does contain essays that are for the specialist reader in psychoanalysis, its great merit resides in the diverse range of many poetically constructed essays and one hopes that Lost Childhood will reach readers outside the field of psychoanalysis as the editors have found writers for whom to write about loss is to bring out the very best in one’s reflections on life itself.’

• Preface in Three VoicesJudit Szekacs-WeiszKathleen Kelley-Lainé Judit Mészáros  IntroductionJohn Clare 1. Mother Tongue and Other TonguesHow to be a Bi-lingual PsychotherapistJudith Szekacs-WeiszLanguages of Loss, Languages of ConnectednessJulia Borossa From Cottage Cheese to Swiss CottageLeon Kleimberg 2. Lost and Found in TranslationBetween Worlds, Between WordsEva HoffmanI Need to Hide in my Foreignness, Will You Let Me?Pina AntinucciAnother Tongue, Another VoiceSusan HaxellThe Metaphors We Live ByKathleen Kelley-Lainé3. Analysts in TransitionMarginality and the Language of AllusionsFerenc Erós‘Budapest School’ A School? Yes and No.Judit MészárosAnalysts in Transition, Analysis in TranslationRiccardo Steiner4. Migration, Loss and MemoryLanguages of the Inner ExileAntal BokayImmigration Loss and MemoryJacqueline Amati-MehlerGetting Away from the Mother TongueJohn ClareChildhood Lost and FoundRachel Rosenblum5. TraumaThe Politics of ExileAli ZarbafiIn Times of TroublesGeorge PickThe Impaired TongueShula WilsonChildhood in a Time TunnelTamara Stajner-Popovic6. Words and DreamsWriting in an Adopted LanguageEva AlmassyThe Language of Social Dreaming and ChildhoodGordon LawrenceNotes on Holding Exile in the Dialogue Between AnalystsJudith E. Vida and Gershon J. Molad