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  • Preface
  • Peter L. Rudnytsky

As Franco Borgogno has written in his indispensable book reviewed in this issue, "it is Ferenczi, more than any of its other pioneers, who personifies the essence of psychoanalysis" (1999, 260). Such, at least, is the conviction shared by an ever-increasing number of people in the psychoanalytic community, many of whom converged on the northern Hungarian city of Miskolc, November 27–29, 2008, for the conference "Sándor Ferenczi Returns Home," selected papers of which I am delighted to be able to publish here.

It is in Ferenczi's spirit that our collection of authors should be international and include renowned senior analysts and scholars as well as exceptionally gifted younger colleagues. We begin with Ernst Falzeder of Salzburg, primus inter pares as an editor of psychoanalytic correspondences, whose "Sándor Ferenczi between Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy" strikes a keynote in judiciously weighing Ferenczi's never fully resolved conflict between "an unqualified dedication to a School, to a Cause" and his "nonconformist, rebellious, and creative spirit," and in urging prospective disciples to heed the admonition of Nietzsche's Zarathustra in their attitude not only toward Freud but toward Ferenczi as well.

Like Ferenczi himself, historian Krisztián Kapusi is a native son of Miskolc, and in "Toward a Biography of Sándor Ferenczi: Footnotes from Miskolc," Kapusi treats the reader to some tidbits from his archival forays: the questions answered by Ferenczi in his 1890 final secondary school examinations, the location of the family vineyard "on the emblematic hill of Miskolc," the fact that Ferenczi left the Jewish congregation of Budapest, a contemporary account of the personality of Ferenczi's mother, and so forth. Kapusi is becomingly modest in his claims for the significance of his discoveries, but one need not idolize Ferenczi to welcome any addition, however small, to our store of knowledge about his life. [End Page 391]

Our final paper directly concerned with Ferenczi is Luis J. Martin Cabré's "Ferenczi's 'Feminine Principle': A Feminine Version of the Death Drive." Cabré, a training analyst in Madrid, where he was the main force behind the 1998 conference "Ferenczi and Contemporary Psychoanalysis," sees in Ferenczi's elaboration of a "feminine principle" a counterpoint to Freud's theory of the death drive that inheres in both nature and the psyche. This capacity "to suffer, to wait, to undergo and tolerate frustration" undergirds not only "maternity and altruism" but also "the ability to be an analyst."

We follow with two papers on Ferenczi's heirs. Horst Kächele, the distinguished psychoanalyst and researcher based in Ulm, surveys the contributions of Imre Hermann, a pioneer of attachment theory and pillar of the Budapest School of psychoanalysis. Then, in a tour de force, American scholar and clinician B. William Brennan, from Providence, Rhode Island, presents a comprehensive introduction to "Ferenczi's Forgotten Messenger," Izette de Forest, who underwent analytic training with Ferenczi in the late 1920s and whose 1942 paper in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, "The Therapeutic Technique of Sándor Ferenczi," was in fact the first exposition of Ferenczi's ideas in the journal of record of psychoanalysis—preceding by seven years the posthumous publication of Ferenczi's own "The Confusion of Tongues between Adults and the Child"—though de Forest's pivotal role in the transmission of Ferenczi's legacy in the United States has been almost entirely overshadowed by the limelight suffusing her contemporary, Clara Thompson.

We close our articles section with two papers addressing the vexed topic of psychoanalysis and the paranormal. Júlia Gyimesi, already an accomplished intellectual historian completing her dissertation in Budapest, argues in "The Problem of Demarcation: Psychoanalysis and the Occult" that Freud's notorious insistence on a sexual definition of libido in his conflict with Jung can be understood in the context of his effort to distinguish a specifically psychoanalytic concept of the unconscious from the spiritual meanings ascribed to it by contemporary proponents of the occult. Conversely, Mikita Brottman, trained at Oxford and currently chair of the Humanities Program at the Pacifica Graduate Institute, contends in "Psychoanalysis and Magic: Then and Now" that, even according to Freud himself, the occult [End Page 392] is "inextricable from psychoanalysis...

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