Woody Allen and the Hungarian Psyche

Hungarians easily identify with Woody Allen who said:

“I have a persecution complex – because I’m persecuted.”

Oscillating between East and West, rebellion and subjection, euphoria and gloom, naiveté and suspicion (the list could go on), the Hungarian psyche has a built-in mechanism for over-reaction alternating with fatalism. It is a recipe for achievement and breakdown.

Hungarian novelist and thinker Arthur Koestler observed that “The hopeless isolation of this nation breeds its talents, its will to assert itself, and its hysteria; to be Hungarian is a collective neurosis.”

A Magyar patriot suffers from feelings of injured merit (sértett önérzet).

He is also tortured by a determination to “catch up” with “the West” (economies that he regards as more advanced than his own).

Hungarian families generally do not expect to move away to get work. This is in sharp contrast to the West, where the massive inroads of modernism and economic necessity have made mobility for the sake of work a virtue. Here, young people will move to a major town to study, and that will be perhaps the one transition they will make in their lives.

In a society where trust is limited, relationships are more important.