From national—political psychology” to “scientific race theory”

Abstract

Abstract. From national—political psychology” to “scientific race theory” In this essay I investigate the impact of racial, nationalist, characterological ideas on Hungarian psychology and on its border disciplines (pedagogy, psychiatry, medicine, anthropology, biology, anthropology, eugenics) between the two world wars. The Hungarian Psychological Association and its journal, the Hungarian Psychological Review was founded under the presidentship and editorship of the renowned psychologist Pál Ranschburg. Although the Society and the Review distanced themselves from the right wing, nationalist political influences, racist, discriminative tendencies started to appear more and more frequently in the journal from the 1930s on (e.g. in the writings of the psychologist István Boda, and the psychiatrist László Benedek). These openly racist psychological views were based on the eugenic, racial biological theories of the age, represented by István Apáthy, Pál Teleki, Lajos Méhely etc.). I also discuss a few other forms of racialist views that opposed the Nazi type ideas of racial differences based on “blood”, nevertheless shared the basic tenets of an essentialist, ethno-nationalist dicourse focusing on the concept of national character (József Somogyi, Sándor Karácsony). Finally, I raise the question of why, 70 years after the Holocaust, this “grey zone” of the history of Hungarian psychology has remained in the dark until today, in contrast to German and Austrian attempts of discovering the past in this field, too. Keywords: racial theory; eugenics; national psychology, national character