Péter Szil

Photo: Kata Pál

I was born in Hungary in 1951, where I studied to become a historian. After an adventurous escape from Hungary in 1974 I was received as a political refugee in Sweden, which became the birthcountry of my adult self. It was there and in the US that I trained first in different forms of natural medicine, and later as a psychotherapist. During the late 1970s I was one of the initiators of the pro-feminist men’s groups in Sweden aimed at the self-critical deconstruction of the male role.

In the beginning of the 1990s I moved to Spain because of health and family reasons. Besides my clinical work as a psychotherapist, supervisor and trainer of professionals I’m active in theoretical and practical endeavors on the societal level aimed at the implementation of equality between women and men, and the eradication of all kinds of violence against women and children.

The youngest of my three already grown up children, who was born in Sweden and spent her childhood in Spain, decided to move to Budapest in 2000, when she was 14 years old, in order to pursue her musical studies there. The joyful obligation of taking care of her made Hungary the main site of my life again. Ever since then I have lived as a kind of commuter between countries, combining an intensive professional activity in Spain with regular stays of both private and professional character in Hungary, and shorter cultural sojourns in Sweden.