Abstract
I must have first met Tom Ormay late in the 1980s. I found him a little difficult to understand at first but quite quickly grew to like his quiet manner that at times could also boil up and over when he met too much bureaucratic questioning whenever he had to propose something formally and he was then met with blockhead opposition. Otherwise, he was a gentle man who came at the prevailing situation in a quiet approach and occasionally with an outburst of temper, which was never born long and never with ill-will.
He was a poet who was quiet about his poetry, yet who adorned his book on ‘Nos’ with many poetic quotations—you don’t see many of these in books on group analysis or even psychoanalysis. Freud’s assessment that The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious. What I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied.
. . . suggests that the poets have a way into human understanding that precedes any scientific approach. Tom would have agreed with Freud. Tom Ormay was interested not only in what might be uncovered as fact about life but the poetry that very often came in well before the science and had a more nuanced comprehension than laboratory attempts might provide on the indefinable nature of human life.
Besides poetry and maintaining a practice in psychotherapy and group analysis, Tom was active when living in London in a good deal of teaching and supervision. He was a supervisor for the Goldsmith’s training in group psychotherapy from 1988 onwards for several years and was often employed around London by other bodies such as AGIP and the London Centre for Psychotherapy.
At one time I realized that he might well have been in Budapest at the time of the 1956 uprising, so I asked him about it. Yes, he had been, one of the more prominent students. Once it became clear that the Soviet army could not be defeated and realizing he was in a likely compromised position, he told me that he followed a river west towards Austria and reached there after a week or so of walking. He crossed the border and finally reached London. He seemed reluctant to speak about those times, perhaps affected by a sense of being a survivor when many others had not survived with their lives or else had ended up in jails and camps. Being an immigrant, however well welcomed, having lost his country of birth and mother tongue, he resembled Foulkes and the silent trials that they both inevitably went through. This may have influenced his choice of group-analysis.
He gave the GASI’s 37th S.H. Foulkes’ lecture in 2013, which he based on his recently published book entitled The Social Nature of Persons: One Person is No Person (2013). The title itself was sufficiently declarative to rouse group-analysts’ attention. He had written and published it originally in Hungarian and in it championed Ferenczi’s 1920’s outline of a potential group analysis. He translated his own book into English. In it he espoused the need to acknowledge that the tripartite model of the human character, adopted by Freud and psychoanalysts since 1923, had considerable limitations when group-analysis came to consider just that social nature of persons. Once one has achieved maturity, when one is able to exercise one’s agency, there is not much, apart from the material world, upon which to express agency. There is the materialism of the current world in all its complex unoriginality of tedium and money-making. Beyond this lies the desert of social interaction which lies outside the formal settings of societies and clubs etc.
What Tom argued, from his position as trained philosopher as well as poet, therapist and group-analyst, is that once superego was put ‘in its place’ and no longer allowed to dominate an individual life, there needs to be a further house of the humans and he called it nos.
The superego does not disappear in the new setting; it forms a bridge between the ego and nos. (Ormay, 2012: 34)
Nos derives from the Latin word for ‘us’, the togetherness of us all, whether at times we like it or not. From id to ego and via superego to nos. This state recognizes and indeed is the experience of being human in a full sense. He regularly wrote and spoke about the need for love to be available at all times for human association to be tolerable, and he coupled this with nos; the epigraph to his book is Love and you will be free
He had a human sense that he preserved in himself of not being well organized when he probably needed to be. In the first decade of this century when he had settled back in Budapest (before Hungary had become home to an authoritarian ruler, whose person and rule he loathed), he organized and ran a workshop for the GAS based in Budapest. He had asked me to convene the large group each day it met, to which I readily agreed. He then realized that he had also included social dreaming sessions about which he apparently knew little or nothing. He turned to me and asked if I would run this too. I agreed but I too knew very little and said so. He poo-poohed, ‘Just put out the chairs and ask them to speak about their dreams’. I did so, to be interrupted quickly by a knowledgeable Portuguese couple who quickly put us right about how the chairs ought best to be set out, as star shapes pointing into the centre. While superego could have imposed an unsettling reaction to this failure of the organizers, the nos of working through things together excluded any such experience arising.
His book and theory have not had much attention since publication I feel. If I am correct about this, it may be due to the gathering world situation of globalized capitalism and economy that emphasizes only the accruing of material goods and the narcissistic mirroring that this brings with it; ‘I am the goods I have hoarded. No less, no more’: the dreary opposite of poetry and nos. The poetry that for Tom transforms the world and illuminates it seems to have little or no place. What we treasure as so called ‘countryside’ is merely a food factory with no poetry apart from cylinders of baled hay strewn about fields.
He was editor of The Journal Group Analysis for six years this century, succeeding Malcolm Pines’ long tenure. During his editorship the Journal became an online publication and insisted that the committee and readers adapt to this new form of presentation while also remaining a printed journal for those who chose. He also cooperated in helping it become available to student members for a much lower cost than previously, along with President Robi Friedman.
Tom always was not of the establishment despite having served on committees and as editor. He was a social person to his depths but not a sympathiser with bureaucracy. His open laugh will not be heard again, nor his abrupt questioning voice. We need more like him.
Requiescat in pace.