Lost Childhood and the Language of Exile

The book contains reflections from Eva Almassy, Jacqueline Amati-Mehler, Pina Antinucci, Antal Bokay, Julia Borossa, John Clare, Ferenc Erós, Susan Haxell,Eva Hoffman, Kathleen Kelley-Lainé, Leon Kleimberg, W. Gordon Lawrence, Judit Mészáros, Gershon J. Molad, George Pick, Rachel Rosenblum, Tamara Stajner-Popovic, Riccardo Steiner, Judit Szekacs-Weisz, Judith E. Vida, Shula Wilson, and Ali Zarbafi.

Lost Childhood and the Language of Exile invites the reader to enter a territory which is not only multilingual but multidimensional: defined and shaped by history, politics, economy, and sociocultural transformations. The contributions give important insights on the psychodynamic processes involved in working with, and being part of, exiled and immigrant populations.

The majority of the stories take as their base the upheaval caused by the Second World War but their stories are still, sadly, relevant today with the ongoing plight of refugees the world over. By presenting their experiences, the contributors provide a vital record of what it means to leave your homeland behind, to make a new life in a new land, and to live and work in a second tongue. The aim was, and is, to provide stimulus for further thinking and research. Two contributors, Ali Zarbafi and Shula Wilson, took up that challenge and we were delighted to publish their contribution to this debate in their edited work, Mother Tongue and Other Tongues: Narratives in Multilingual Psychotherapy (2021).

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).