A lélek segédigéi. A munkaszolgálat tapasztalata és elaborációja: Mérei Ferenc
Auxiliary Verbs of the Soul. The experience and elaboration of forced labor service: Ferenc Mérei

Summary/Abstract: The paper, a preliminary study to the biography to be written about the psychologist Ferenc Mérei (1909-1986) is an attempt to understand the experiences of the period of forced labor service between 1942–1944. The fundamental question is this: why does Mérei almost always speak positively about the forced labor service? Using the so called cross treatment of sources, the documents in the archives, unpublished manuscripts, interviews, conversations about Mérei and his own scientific work two simultaneous patterns of life-conduct can be reconstructed: (1) “Nocht–Nicht–Sein”, the revolutionary teleology looking into the future, the belief that joining the Red Army is a possibility for the realization of the “communist revolution”; and (2) the pleasure principle, the a hic–et–nunc existence that regards the given life situation as empirical reality and gains consciousness of itself by making use of the minor pleasures aimed at survival. According to the paper’s conclusions it is the political creed and the genuineness of the experience of minor pleasures as well as the elaboration of traumas that resulted in successful psychic elaboration in Mérei’s case (compared to other survivors of the holocaust and forced labor service).

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