Vintage

Ferenczi's Forgotten Messenger:

The Life and Work of Izette de Forest

As relational theory has traced some of its historical roots to Sándor Ferenczi there has been a resurgence of interest in his work. In this workshop I will turn to the untold story of one his analysands, Izette de Forest. Mrs. de Forest trained with Ferenczi in 1925, and practiced for many years in Cambridge and New Hampshire. While Ferenczi’s influence in North America is often attributed to Clara Thompson, Izette de Forest was also among the first Americans to train in the Budapest school and bring Ferenczi’s ideas to North America. Drawing on newly discovered primary source material, I will bridge the historical and biographical with the theoretical and clinical and discuss de Forest’s first hand report of what occurred in the analysis, in particular delineating the vicissitudes of the transference. I will compare and contrast de Forest’s view of Ferenczi’s technique put forward in her book “the Leaven of Love,” with Clara Thompson’s, and discuss some of its implications for contemporary practice.

Billy Brennan ThM, MA, LMHC is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Providence. He is a Board Member and Co-Chair of the History Committee of the International Forum for Psychoanalytic Education, and past president of the Rhode Island Association for Psychoanalytic Psychologies. He has presented his research on Izette de Forest at recent Ferenczi Conferences in Hungary and Buenos Aires. He is a graduate of National Institute for the Psychotherapies - National Training Program, New York.