László F. Földényi

 Happiness and Melancholy

The author, in his study examines how the notions of melancholy and happiness transformed in the past two centuries. Prior to the Enlightenment both concepts had metaphysical dimensions which enabled people to orient themselves within their lives. The author examines how these dimensions have narrowed in the past two centuries, the effect of which has become the contemporary understanding of these concepts. These are no longer in relation with the European tradition of their origins.

Júlia Gyimesi

 Psychical Dissociation

The main aim of psychoanalysis was to analyze the psyche in a rational way corresponding to the demands of scientific materialism. Implicitly, this ambition determined not only the methods of the young science of psychology and psychoanalysis, but also required a radical redefinition of the psyche. As a result of this, the psyche represented by psychoanalysis had to distance itself from every kind of transcendence rooted either in traditional Western religions or the modern occult movement.

There were several schools in the early history of psychology which signified a resistance to scientific rationalism. These were often connected with the modern occult movement, especially with the scientific aspect of it. In the cooperation and later separation of the occult movement and scientific psychology or psychoanalysis the problem of the rationalization of the psyche is directly examinable, offering a precise image of the problem of subjectivity in the fin de siècle. The aim of the article is to investigate the opposition of occultism and scientific psychology through the history of psychical dissociation.

Erzsébet Zakariás

 Fluids of the Human Body, Particularly those of Women

Magical reasoning has been part of the culture most probably from the early beginnings, as consciously cultivated or reflex-like constituents of human behavior. In most cultures a whole range of protective or preventive magi-cal acts had played an important role not only in securing the internal equilibrium of the individual, but by intermingling with the scientifically proven body of knowledge it often became part of the order-providing horizon of everyday life. Researchers of the Hungarian belief-systems have published, beginning with the 19th century, several works in which the deployment of fluids of the human body, particularly those of women, in different magical acts – like healing, erotic witchcraft, impairment – has been reported. Based on some of those works, on the one hand, and on my personal research, on the other, I address the issue of the magical use of the saliva, mother-milk and blood in the traditional culture of Hungarians in general, and in the Baraolt-basin of Szeklerland, in particular.  

Ferenc Zsélyi

 Buddy Textures/ Textual Bodies

The paper maps how bodies become representative and how they start to signify on the different levels of interpretation: organically, iconically, culturally, in transfer, on the metanarrative level, mythically, psychically, and hermeneutically. The object text is Bram Stoker’s 1897 „gothic” novel, Dracula in which the protagonist, Count Dracula who is a ghost, sucks the blood of all the other characters. If he “infects” someone this way that person loses her or his choice of ever dying. He kills to steal people of death, birth, time and its discourses (history, identity, social status). The plot of the novel, the way the different Dutch and British Christian characters try to give an account of what has happened sometime somewhere in the heathen East, of the characters’ personal needs, of their drives and (political) interests each in turn changes the facts: facts do not „occur” in this narrative, there is only interpretation, interpellation and interference. Dracula’s body and plot are the results of me-diation: both are representations. The other characters say that Dracula, who is never there physically – only in vision, in other characters’ minds, in nightmares and visions –, scars bo-dies, and opens body surfaces so that blood, tremor, hallucination could flow from their insides out. Dracula’s visionary interference makes the inside come out, the unconscious become conscious, the invisible visible: conscience sublimates nonsense. Those characters who seem to be remembering this earn honour, prestige, social status and wealth. Dracula’s visionary ghastliness is the „currency” via which the narrative transfers the „symbolic economies” of nature and culture into one another. The bodies, the blood spilled, abjection and hysteria are all ways of telling and showing the yet untold. Blood, sweat, tremor and tears have become consubstantial with words, language.