The travelling psychoanalyst

Andrew Peto and transnational explorations of psychoanalysis in Budapest, Sydney and New York

Joy Damousi

pp. 127-144

in: Joy Damousi, Mariano Ben Plotkin (eds), The transnational unconscious, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009

Abstract

When the Hungarian born psychoanalyst, Andrew Peto, rose in August 1951 to address a small audience who had assembled in a room at British Medical Association House in Macquarie Street, Sydney, it is true to say that a historic moment had arrived. Peto's inaugural paper on the prevention of juvenile delinquency, to the newly constituted Sydney Institute of Psychoanalysis, christened the birth of a new institution. The institute was barely two-months old, having been formed by Peto, the leading Sydney psychoanalyst Roy Winn and Siegfried Fink. Fink, like Peto, was a European immigrant who had arrived in 1938 from Germany; he worked in the health services to have his medical qualifications recognised, and then became a practicing analyst in Sydney.