Psychoanalytic Reflections on Politics: Fatherlands in Mothers' Hands by Eszter Salgo

Author:Eszter Salgo [Salgo, Eszter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Psychology, History & Theory, Psychoanalysis, Movements, Political Science, Mental Health
ISBN: 9781317962106
Google: eRcKAgAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 20858709
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-11-07T00:00:00+00:00

Total politics and the dream of a permanent carnival

The lengthy governance of several charismatic authoritarian leaders suggests that Hungarian society is used to being (and strives to be) governed by a strong commander in chief, a rigorous father that compensates for the absence of the Symbolic Father. Portrayed as the ‘father of the Hungarian nation’, Regent Horthy was at the head of a regime from 1920 until 1944, when he was betrayed by his (little-loved) son, the Arrow Cross leader Ferenc Szálasi (who promptly turned Hungary into a German client state and re-launched the deportation of Jews). János Kádár was a successful political survivor as well: from primordial father (protagonist of the bloody repression of the 1956 revolution), he turned into a (seemingly) caring daddy and led the country as General Secretary of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party until 1988. With his ‘goulash communism’ he transformed Hungary into the ‘happiest barrack’ and himself into the most popular leader of the Communist bloc. The state supplied its citizens with refrigerators and automobiles, with white bread and some rations of butter, yet the country topped international tables of suicide, alcoholism and abortion rates.

The authoritarian fathers of the Hungarian nation have never guaranteed their children the promised stability and happiness.

At the first democratic elections in 1990, people expressed their wish to become liberated from an oppressive community that nourished conformism and compliance, to be free to create and live in a social environment where the individual potentialities could be maximized and where one’s own dreams could be accomplished without the excessive interference of the group. Twenty years later, many had to come to terms with a painful reality – that the pleasure of individuality could not compensate for the absence of an intimate community and membership in the European Union could provide only a (disappointing) compromise solution. The vast majority of citizens, feeling alone and longing for protection, decided to join Viktor Orbán’s ‘fantastic family’ and accepted to substitute the common European house with the Magyar homeland.

The need to be different and the quest to be part of a community are among the strongest universal urges of the human psyche. While in a healthy society there exists a relative balance between devotion to the collectivity and the pursuit of individual aspirations, in Hungary the balance seems to be upset. At least officially, for the government and for the far right-wing Jobbik party (and their supporters), the wish to serve the collectivity becomes a central goal in life while personal aspirations are pushed to the background. Nationalist discourse puts to the fore the idea that individuals should not be separated from the community but perform all their activities in the name of the nation. Freedom in this sense implies often an ‘escape from freedom’ (Fromm 1969), a liberation from the burden of separateness and individuality.

Finding the experience of the EU membership intolerable and willing to take whatever measures necessary to abolish people’s feelings of loss, the government set out to replace the politics of compromise with Total Politics, the powerless community with an omnipotent community.

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