Welcome to my website!
About me
My name is Alexander Batthyány. I work as a Professor of Theoretical Psychology and head of the Research Group for Theoretical Psychology and Studies of the Person at Pázmány Catholic University in Budapest, and am member of the Philosophical–Theological–Biological (PTB) Consortium at the Faculty of Life Sciences, University of Vienna.
I am (though currently on pause for political reasons) guest professor in Existential Psychotherapy at the University Institute of Psychoanalysis in Moscow, and have the honour and pleasure of serving as Director of the Viktor Frankl Institute Vienna.
About my work
My research and writing revolve around the nature of mind and consciousness, the role of meaning in psychology and psychotherapy, care for those in need, and the psychology of death and dying.
This work has resulted in fourteen authored and twelve edited books—some written alone, others together with friends and colleagues—several of which have been translated into fourteen languages. Much of my recent research focuses on paradoxical and terminal lucidity, including the first international study of contemporary cases (Batthyány & Greyson, 2021).
Beyond academia
Together with my wife and our two daughters, I divide my time between Vienna and the Hungarian countryside, where we are developing an alternative community project on our family estate near Sárvár — home also to the Valentin Tomberg Archive and a Waldorf Community Project. Amidst some eighteen old houses, barns, and stables, a vibrant and many-voiced place is slowly coming to life: a space for community, contemplation and creation — for artists, philosophers, and scientists, and for all who care for the wellbeing of others and of nature.
Also, I am profoundly interested in music and its architecture. I consider pentatonic systems—especially the Japanese iwato mode—to embody a rare purity and luminosity of form, most strikingly revealed in solo instrumentation such as the theremin, which I have been studying for roughly a decade.