Vera Roboz
VERA ROBOZ
Christine Vickers
To write biographically about the Hungarian born Australian analyst Vera Roboz is to wonder about the impact of the Stalinist regime on the human mind, and upon the relationships within it. It is also an encounter with freedom. I have heard so many stories of this woman: of immense kindness and compassion. Of rigour, rigidity, confrontation and sheer injustice. And thought. How to write all this? My Hungarian interpreter, of the language as well as the culture, speaks of the wheels within wheels within the Stalinist period. Meaning and relationships are clouded, and motivations are unclear when people must live in authoritarian spaces where political and social repression are entwined. What is said, and what is meant, is often murky she explains. Definitions of humanity, inevitably including the dark sides of the mind, will test one’s capacity for courage, and cowardice. How does one think and write with understanding about the people one encounters in a historical project where such oppressive trauma has been lived? Was it that with migration from Hungary to Australia that Vera realised her voice and desire as a psychoanalyst? This is the story so far.
Vera Roboz Groak, known to the Australian psychoanalytical community as ‘Vera Roboz’ or, to her patients and supervisees, ‘Mrs Roboz’, is a complex figure. She arrived with her husband Budapest Paediatrician Dr Pal Roboz in July 1957 following the Hungarian uprising in November 1956. Their drawcard was family. Vera’s sister-in-law Roszi – Rosa Groak heralded the way in 1946 , sponsored by her brother, Matthew Forgasc in 1946 fleeing Hungary with her twelve year old daughter Anna. Her husband, brother, Bela Groak, a prominent Budapest physician, had died in a labor camp in the Ukraine in 1944. Two of Vera’s aunts arrived in Melbourne in 1948. Yolanthe Gellert travelled with her husband Aron Gellert, a barrister. Margit Pogany an artist, landed with them. This family group settled in the Melbourne suburb of Camberwell. Each family group resided within walking distance of one another, as they had done in Budapest.
Born in 1912 Vera was the third child of Dr Erno Groak a prominent and well liked Budapest physician. Her mother, Irma Pollastek Groak, was actively involved in Budapest Society, involved in fundraising and auxiliary activities during the Great War. During the 1920s she was involved with a women’s organisation raising funds and collecting material relief, for middle-class Jews displaced by the Numerus Clausus and who had fallen into penury. This brought her into contact with Hungary’s Jewish leadersip during the Bethlen government. Led by Erno Brody it argued for Jewish inclusion in modern Hungary rather than as a separate group potentially at risk of antiemetic violence. Vera would have assisted her mother with these activities. In 1932 at the age of twenty, Vera participated in an event, the Women’s Career Choice Panel conducted by the Working Women’s Journal
Vera is listed as a student in the Faculty of humanities at the University of Budapest from 1929 until 1933. She appears to have become interested in Special Education in about 1931 when her first publication : a review of an article on the education of blind children by the Polish educationalist Dr. Maria Grzegorzewska published in the March edition of the journal Magyar Gyógypedagógia
It is most likely Vera joined Lipot Szondi’s laboratory at the Apponyi Clinic in the early 1930s. Szondi, a neurologist sought to identify the genetic and family origins of one’s life and career choices, resulting in what he called ‘fate analysis’. It opened the way for development of the ‘family unconscious.’ To do so he set about building ‘family books’. Collecting family histories over several generations examining work and marital choices, mental illness, delinquency and criminal activity using physiological and family history data collection. This work, undertaken in very basic conditions, where Szondi relied upon volunteer labour, drew students from teaching and medicine. Vera’s speciality, eventually, was juvenile delinquency. Her husband to be, Pal Roboz, who also worked at the clinic, focussed on ‘stuttering’. Both continued at the laboratory after their marriage in 1934. In 1938 shortly after the birth of her only child, Agnes, Vera published an article on Stuttering in the popular magazine, Gyermek Neveles.
It is possible that Vera and Clara Lazar Geroe met during the 1930s or knew of one another. Clara, a physician, had undertaken her neurology internship at Budapest’s Apponyi Clinic and had also published reviews of research into the links between personality and adrenal secretions: one of Szondi’s specialties. She also worked at a children’s camp auspiced by the Baroness Herzog through the Apponyi Clinic. But where Vera and Pal Roboz continued working with Szondi, Geroe moved more fully into clinical work with the Hungarian Psychoanalytical Society and into Anna Freud’s circle.
During the 1930s psychoanalysts of the Hungarian Society were regular attenders at Szondi’s monthly meetings seeking to combine his work on family inheritance with psychoanalysis. These included Imre Hermann, Istvan Hollos. Hermann, in particular sought to develop his own line of research looking into links between physics, mathematics and the unconscious. Vera Roboz assisted him in this work.
It is possible that Vera became interested in psychoanalysis during this period although marriage and motherhood may have intervened. And of course the antiJewish Legislation may have affected Pal Roboz’s career. However the link between Szondi and the Roboz couple strengthened as the war years unfolded. After Hitler’s invasion in 1944, in July of that year, 1600 Hungarian Jews escaped on a train commissioned by Rudolf Kastner. For a sum of money it was supposed to be headed for Switzerland but was diverted to Bergen Belsen. After protracted negotiation the passengers were able to proceed. Szondi and his family were among those passengers, staying with the Roboz couple for several nights before proceeding to the train. When Szondi did not return to Budapest in 1946, deciding to stay in Switzerland, Pal Roboz took over the directorship of Szondi’s clinic.
Research into the Roboz career, as with the history of Hungarian Psychoanalysis, takes us into the ferment of post war Hungary and the Stalinization of psychology and psychoanalysis. We know that the Hungarian Psychoanalytical Society was dissolved in 1948 prior to the Stalinists doing it for them. We will learn, increasingly of the Pavlovisation of psychology and psychoanalysis, including psychoanalyst Isvtan Schoenberger’s lecture on Pavlov to the Hungarian Society in 1947. We can learn of Vera Roboz’s lecture on technique presented to the Society as a guest of Imre Hermann in 1948. We will also learn of Vera’s work as a psychologist all the while negotiating the perils of the Stalinist regime, working as an ‘analyst’ in a girls home for several years and, during the 1950s, providing a training in special education at the Teachers Education Colleges in Budapest.
Vera’s and Pal’s arrival in Australia in 1957 was welcomed by Clara Geroe. They were fellow Hungarians. It was Clara’s practice to do so: many refugees had stayed at her home during their first weeks in Australia. She accommodated both Vera and Pal Roboz at the Melbourne Institute of Psychoanalysis for several years, utlised Vera’s skills in the Szondi technique and, as requested by the British Institute of Psychoanalysis, supervised Vera’s final steps, from her status, designated by the Society, as a ‘third year student’ towards Associate Membership of the British Psychoanalytical Society, achieved in 1962. But then the relationship soured. Were long differences within the Budapest psychoanalytical movement behind this? Or was it about class and social status even in far away Australia?
Vera was, and is, a figure of controversy in the Australian psychoanalytic community. But patterns emerge. First, from the young women who went to see her for analysis ( maybe) supervision or consultation during the 1970s there are stories of immense kindness. She allowed me to bring my dogs, one says of her supervision with Vera. Perhaps she wanted to see how I interact with them.
She spoke to me about motherhood, how that time was too short, says another. Yet another tells a similar story while someone else speaks of her understanding of their grief in a deeply personal situation.
Vera knew about loss, about displacement, and grief. But she could confront. Was she strict? Too rigid? Too psychoanalytic – where only the couch defined it? She stood up to those men. And was it that they also felt dismissed and disparaged? Not psychoanalytical enough. And more.
Vera had her own grief, the loss of her daughter, and only child, was foremost. The Agnes Roboz memorial award for the best woman undergraduate woman medical student at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden continues.