Among my souvenirs
A bibliography, and a personal reminiscence
FROM THE ARCHIVE
Not as assiduously as I should, I have been continuing to box my personal archive. I do not have time to sort through all this stuff as it deserves but I am reminded that it includes all sorts of materials and items that possibly exist nowhere else. Here is just one example, selected for publication here for no reason other than it is short enough to retype, and because of memories that it engenders.
A bibliography
Select bilbiography
Károly Ákos
Books
Psychology of Mysticism, 1955, 191 pages, in Hungarian
Do Animals Think? 1960, 140 pages, in Hungarian (Russian edition, 1965)
The World of our Senses, 1960, 291 pages, in Hungarian
Cognition, 1961, 234 pages, in Hungarian
Our Nervous System, 1963, 296 pages, in Hungarian
The Soul, 1964, 221 pages, in Hungarian
The Critical Flicker Frequency Series Effect (with Magda Ákos), 1966, 245 pages, in English
Conductive Education (with Mária Hári), 1971, 341 pages, in Hungarian (two Japanese and an English edition)
In Whirl of Times, 1975, 361 pages, in Hungarian
Fatigue in Psychochronographic Examination (with Magda Ákos), 1979, 475 pages
Dina (with Magda Ákos), 1988, 252 pages, in Geman (English edition, 1991
Papers
Around one hundred in all, including:
Do animals think? In Science and Humanity, International Yearbook of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, 1960, in Russian
The Growth of Science: its Premises and its Dangers (with E. P. Wigner, Nobel Prize Winner for Physics). Magyar Tudomany, May 1969
Additionally
Five books for teenagers:
Animals: an unknown World, 1960, 380 pages
Man: an UnknownWorld, 328 pages, 1962
Series on religion and psychology:
Sunday, 1962, 271 pages
Sacrifice, 1963, 262 pages
Devil, 1964, 230 pages
Editor of
Scientific Studies in Conductive Education
series on Darwin
a four-volume medical dictionary
Translator of
Brehms Tierleben
'While in the fifties the sporadic attempts at systematic atheism tended to degenerate into anti-clericism and mud-slinging […] an exception was provided by Károly Ákos who, over the past twenty years, has published an impressive number of books and studies, popularising (at a good literary level) basic atheistic views concerning the genesis, history and current practices of the world's religions.'
Erwin László, The Communist Ideology in Hungary, Dordrecht, D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1966, p 82 and n. 5
K. A.
March 1992
A personal reminiscence
In the nineteen-eighties and on into the nineties I used to visit appartment where Károly Ákos and his wife Magda lived in Budapest, in genteel penury. They lived on the corner of Vörös Hadsereg útja as it then was ('Street of the Red Army') and . In front of the house was a tram stop from which it was but a few minutes' journey down the broad highway to Kútvölgyi út, where the main building of the Pető Institute stands. The Ákoses had had never visited there and, as far as I know, subsequently they never did. Whether this was a self-inflicted alienation, or whether they were personae non gratis, I do not know.
Suffice it here that students and conductors at the Pető Institute seeed not to know of the Ákoses and their work, and do not still (with one notable exception, for one of their daughters was a conductor). It was others who followed me to the Ákoses' appartment and were very warmly received there, and heard their reminiscences and their powerful and frank views on András Pető and on the path that his method was now following only a mile of so down the highway from their home.
I had very little Hungarian when I first went there (even less than now). We conversed, through the fog of his growing deafness, largely in his remarkable English, with occasional help from his other daughter (a teacher) and, best of all, through the late Véra Szárkony who could interpret far more than just the language. Magda spoke Englissh well, and took care that the right message was conveyed.
On one occasion I drew attention to a book case which seemed to hold a special pride of place, and asked him its significance. 'These are my books,' Károly answered with justified pride – taking particular satisfaction in showing me the entry that he had had published in the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia. I asked him whether he had a bibliography and, when I visited him the next time that I was in Budapest, he preented me with the above document, prepared in response to my request.
Dina
This was in 1992. Over the previous year I had edited the English edition of Dina, translated from Gaby Haug's original German edition. Oh, he had been such an awkward author to edit. I would send him batches of pages, say a couple of chapters or so at a time – and he would go through them meticulously to make sure that they exactly fitted his original meaning. Quite right too, so he should. Unfortunately, as noted above, his grasp of English was 'remarkable' and we had some terrible tussles. (I had been forewarned about this by Joy Stevens who had managed the translation of the book Conductive Education into English only a few years previously. Her task had been even harder, as she had to cope not just with Károly, but with Mária Hári too, and their disagreements about what was meant by their original Hungarian text).
Still, no bones were broken over Dina, and the book was published, just about on schedule, in 1991. Dina was the most ambition book that our Foundation had attempted up to then and, let me tell you, in those days publishing was no easy matter. We had no computers, neither had our printer, and there was no hint of the on-demand publishing that we can now so take for granted. Everything was done on paper, it all took ages and, when we were ready, we had to order from the printers what seemed a reasonsonable number of copies of the book to make all the effort worthwhile – and to keep down the unit price. Then all we had to do was sell them, to get our money back, to pay the authors some royalty and maybe even to make a few pounds towards what might come next.
Unfortunately, by then the great Conductive Education furore would soon drawto its end in the UK. Conductive Education had had five good years of public acclaim following Standing up for Joe, so perhaps in part deserved the lean years that were to follow. By 1992, when Dina was published, the boom was going bust, with a vengeance. The Foundation for Conductive Education had invested quite a bity of money that it did not have to produce Dina, but the book never sold. Parents still tell me that this quirky little book was the best thing that they ever read on bringing up a child with cerebral palsy, but these parents were members of a tiny minority, those who had bought Dina. In the end, the Foundation had to write off the money spent on Dina, and accept the financial loss as just one more in a whole sea of troubles at that time.
I do not know how Gaby's edition fared in the Gernan-speaking market place. I suspect that it did much the same as ours, for similar reasons. I know that sales of our book fell well short of paying even the printer's bill. Dina did not bring a penny to the Ákoses, and I have deeply regreted that. I know that they did too.
A gentleman and a scholar
Károly was as crazy and as awkward a cuss in his own way as all the other cussed crazies whom I met up with during over over thirty years' contact with Condutive Education across the world. But he was a gentleman and a scholar, and he could have contributed so much. What a terrible loss to Conductive Education.
Some bibiographic footnotes
I do not know how complete was the bibiography that Károly prepared for me.
The titles had already been translated into English for me when I received it.
It would be interesting to know whether he had published more books than he mentioned here, and details of all those other articles that he alludes to.
As for''psychochronicity', this was very much 'their thing' but I have to admit that I never took the time to get to the bottom of it.
As far as I know, subsequent to writing the above bibiography, Károly did not publish anything more.
Dina went on to be published in Russian and Chinese translations (from the English text). I do not know how they fared either, in terms of sales and circulation.
