Zoltán E. Erdély

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Zoltán Emmerich Erdély (born February 3, 1918 in Poprad (Deutschendorf) ; † January 4, 2007 in Frankfurt (Main) ) was a German psychiatrist , psychoanalyst and author.

In his writings, Zoltán Erdély dealt with a central topic of psychoanalysis , but mostly avoided because of its social consequences : the therapy goal, the criterion for healing.

Life

Erdély attended the humanistic high school in his hometown and began studying medicine in Prague in 1936 . Due to the circumstances of the time, he had to interrupt his studies several times and finally received his doctorate in Prague in 1949. He then worked there initially as an assistant doctor at the university clinic, then head doctor in the internal department of a psychiatric hospital. Erdély suffered greatly from having had to live under different dictatorial regimes since the late 1930s. He therefore sought contact with colleagues in the West at an early stage and was finally able to flee Czechoslovakia with his family in 1964, thanks to the help of the psychoanalyst Alexander Mitscherlich . He began training as a psychoanalyst at Mitscherlich's Sigmund Freud Institute in Frankfurt , where he worked as a research assistant for six years. Since 1970 he has worked in Frankfurt / Main as a training and control analyst and as a resident psychoanalyst in his own practice, which he only gave up in 2005, at the age of 87.

plant

Erdély's first book, the subtitle of which the expropriated self is a good match for the topic he is interested in, consists of five essays which, “like a star march, move towards one point. And that is the main idea: ceterum censeo super-ego esse delendam. "This guiding principle aims" at the liberation of people, at the re-admission of their individual self-management, their liberation from an ultimately always destructive, absolutist ruling, internalized authority that manipulates the individual through feelings of guilt and is usually referred to as the super-ego . "

With his investigations and considerations, Erdély touches not only a central psychoanalytic , but also a general anthropological and also philosophical question, that of the possibility of human autonomy . Using case studies and abstractly, he describes how the “expropriation of the self” and its “substitution by the superego” takes place in every human being in early childhood. This implantation of the super-ego, which contains the norms, values, ideals, the ideology of the respective group or society, has a lifelong pathogenic effect on the individual, which denies him elementary opportunities to experience and perceive. This can only be dealt with therapeutically to a limited extent: One can “neither preach away nor analyze away the superego; even through a cultural revolution it cannot be eliminated overnight. "But this psychological authority should be shaken, weakened more and more in the long run:" by revising its content, questioning its right to exist, its all-knowing and seeing-everything and through approval and strengthening sensuality. "

With this objective Erdély falls into a very thin line of tradition in the history of psychoanalysis. The programmatic thoughts of Otto Gross and the young Sándor Ferenczi in the same direction around 1908, and later, around 1930, Wilhelm Reich's “heresy” . Since they were directed against Freud's teaching on one central point, these approaches had no chance within psychoanalysis. Erdély himself does not follow this tradition; he refers to more modern self-psychologists such as Heinz Kohut and Alice Miller as well as to his own clinical experience. As far as can be seen, despite his criticism of Freud and his "radical concerns", he does not seem to have come into conflict with organized psychoanalysis.

Remarks

  1. This is made clear by numerous remarks in his books.
  2. Zoltán E. Erdély: How do I tell my mother? , Frankfurt / Main: Suhrkamp 1989, p. 8
  3. ibid., P. 32
  4. cf. Bernd A. Laska : How Otto Gross was forgotten (made) ; and
    anonymous: The exclusion of Wilhelm Reich from the International Psychoanalytic Association
  5. cf. Peter Kutter: Review of Erdélys And the Reality ... In: Psyche, August 2000, pp. 771–773

Fonts

  • How do I tell my mother? The dispossessed self. Frankfurt / Main: Suhrkamp 1989 ISBN 3-518-28347-2
  • And reality - it does exist. Gießen: Psychosozial-Verlag 1998 ISBN 3-932133-43-9