Radó, Sándor (1890-1972)

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RADÓ, SÁNDOR (1890-1972)

Sándor Radó, a Hungarian psychoanalyst and physician, was born in 1890 in Kisvarda, Hungary, and died on May 14, 1972, in New York City. Radó grew up in a middle-class business family 100 miles from Budapest. He studied at the Universities of Berlin, Bonn, andVienna, completing a political science degree in Budapest in 1911. He then enrolled in medical school in Budapest.

In 1913, Radó became, with four others, one of the founding members of the Hungarian Psychoanalytic Society. He first met Freud before World War I, due to an introduction from Radó's mentor, Sándor Ferenczi. In 1924, when Radó was already prominent in Berlin, Freud chose him to replace Otto Rank as editor-in-chief of the most important analytic journal, the Zeitschrift. Radó was known as an outstanding theoretician, and in Europe analyzed people of the stature of Wilhelm Reich, Heinz Hartmann, and Otto Fenichel.

When the New York Psychoanalytic Society was establishing its first Training Institute in 1931, Radó was invited to be the founding director. In 1935 difficulties arose between himself and Freud. The Viennese analysts around Freud were a palace guard of advisors who long envied Radó's special position. Freud resented the way Radó had been helping analysts to leave the continent for the United States. Radó had opposed Freud's plan to build a new international institute in Vienna after Hitler came to power.

The crisis between Freud and Radó in 1935 was occasioned by a critical review of one of the Radó's monographs written by Jeanne Lampl-de Groot, then a current patient of Freud's. The review appeared to be published with Freud's tacit endorsement. Then, shortly after Karen Horney had been demoted by the education committee of the New York Psychoanalytic Society, Radó was deposed as educational director.

In 1944, just as Radó was to found the Psychoanalytic Clinic at Columbia University's medical school, he was thrown out of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute as a training analyst. Even before then he was viewed as a traitor. Unlike other so-called dissidents within Freud's movement, who chose to make their appeal to the general reading public, Radó wanted to go deeper into university medicine.

Radó had been from the outset of his career in Berlin especially concerned with establishing standards of education and training. Some of his papers from those years, on melancholia and drug addiction for example, continue to seem outstanding. As time went on Radó, like other rebels in analysis, worked out new terms for old concepts. For some years he was a member of the New York State Mental Hygiene Council, and both Governors Averell Harriman and Nelson Rockefeller supported his work with state grants. Radó retired from Columbia in 1955, after which he helped to create the New York School of Psychiatry at the State University of New York, where he was director for ten years.

Radó came to oppose the idea that the removal of repressions and the emergence of buried memories can necessarily be expected to have good therapeutic effects. Also, he thought that the provoking of transferences was a clinical mistake, since regression undermined a patient's capacity for autonomy and self-reliance. In addition, Radó was prescient enough to have emphasized the significance of genetics for the future of psychoanalytic psychiatry.

Radó was a sophisticated European man of letters, who belongs to the radical left within the history of analysis; but it has remained a fragmented tradition of so-called dissenters. Although Radó was for a time allied with New York's Abram Kardiner, and Radó's work on therapy was similar to the ideas of his fellow Hungarian Franz Alexander, these critics of the "mainstream" in analysis have rarely hung together. None of them would have dreamed of citing approvingly such earlier "heretics" as Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, or Rank. The nonconformists have been the ones with the original ideas, even though their position has so far won them inadequate recognition. It is hard to become educated in the real story of analysis because of the sectarianism that has afflicted the movement. As of 2005, some of the most persuasive present-day critics of Freud are only now reinventing concepts that were first advanced many years ago.

Radó's later writings can be hard to follow. He disdained popularizations and put his faith in medical science. Like Freud himself, Radó was a spell-binder who spoke like a book. Yet Radó underestimated Freud's contribution to the humanities, and was intolerant of the significance of analysis for philosophy and the social sciences. Within psychiatry itself, though, Radó may well turn out to have been prophetic.

Paul Roazen

See also: Addiction; Alcoholism; Germany; American Academy of Psychoanalysis; Bulimia; Dipsomania; Hungarian School; Hungary; Internationale Zeitschrift für (ärztliche) Psychoanalyse ; Melancholic depression; New York Psychoanalytic Institute; United States.