The Experiences of the Migrant Child: The Hungarian Psychoanalyst Klára Lázár Geroe, Australia's First Training Analyst 1940–5

This paper is based on a newly discovered archive of the papers of the Hungarian-trained psychoanalyst Dr Klára Lázár Geroe. It is centred on a lecture on the child’s experiences of migration, written and then abandoned by Geroe after five paragraphs in 1944, several years after her arrival in Australia. From 1940 to 1944, Geroe was negotiating the complexities of her role as the first training analyst in Australia, and the resident psychoanalyst at the newly formed Melbourne Institute of Psychoanalysis, launched in October 1940. Within two years of her arrival, Australia was facing the threat of Japanese invasion. The article describes Geroe’s attempts to assist, and to intervene, especially in relation to a government proposal to evacuate children. A critical dimension of her experience concerns ‘insular Australia’, a reference to Australian perceptions of isolation from the rest of the world, despite the Asian nations nearby.