Mérei Ferenc a polgári és a szocialista embereszmény feszültségei közepette
Ferenc Mérei in the Middle of Tensions of a Citoyen and Socialist Image of Man

Summary/Abstract: The work of Ferenc Mérei (1909–1986) the Hungarian social and clinical psychologist and for a time communist educational leader involves several paradoxes. On one hand, we have the leader of the communist education reform between 1945 and 1949, who, as head of the Budapest municipal institute for education and the Countrywide Institute for Educational Research helped shape socialist schooling. On the other hand, from 1950 on, there is the expelled ostracized intellectual, who is even sentenced to prison after the 1956 revolution. As a third step, from the 1970s on, he appears as the leader of small groups, displaying life style reforms relying on mental resistance and resilience. In my view, these dualities are not only due to constraints of external life events, but are embedded in the internal dilemmas of the intellectual tensions continuously characterizing Mérei. From the time he spent in France in the early 1930s he cherished the belief that a harmony could be found between a child-centered educational commitment as a continuation of the heritage of French enlightenment (I consider this to be a citoyen individuation ideal) and the centralizing principles of communist social organization aimed at equalization. In his organizational work while he made many efforts to center socialist education around the program of a comprehensive school based on principles of democratic equality, he connected these to the belief that the peculiar emotional atmosphere of child communities could reconcile equality and centralization. I try to show that bourgeois individualization as one starting point of modern psychology is difficult to reconcile with community liberation with burocratic inspirations. The liberal child based ideals of education are not easy to reconcile with leftist ideals of equality – contrary to what was and is believed by many left wing citoyen thinkers, among them by Mérei.

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