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Michael Balint was quite a special personality in psychoanalysis. He did not belong to any school. He learned from all of them but followed his own ideas. He was interested in many topics, but his thought follows a straight line from the first of his papers written in the 1930s until his last book, The Basic Fault. He was a faithful pupil, friend, and colleague of Sándor Ferenczi, whose ways of thinking certainly left a deep and always acknowledged mark on him. Balint even used to say that he was never cured of his transference neurosis toward him.

Balint did not devote his life only to promoting Ferenczi's ideas; he developed them in his own way, with his own inspiration and through his own sensibility. In a note written in 1932 in Luchon, Ferenczi said that Balint took things up where he himself got stuck. He was probably thinking of the problem of regression; he realized that severely traumatized people need to go through a regressive phase, but it is Balint who discovered which kind of regression offers a way out toward a “new beginning,” and which one leads to a malignant evolution toward an inexhaustible spiral of claims or gratifications.

Like Ferenczi, Balint was somewhat marginalized by the psychoanalytic community. In spite of his efforts to never scandalize his colleagues, his thinking was too original and his ways not authoritarian enough to create a school and collect pupils in order to acquire some powerful position in the psychoanalytic community. He probably would have liked it, but was not ready to adopt the necessary behavior to obtain it. He was ambitious and used to joke about his narcissistic tendencies, saying that he liked to be a “prima donna,” standing all alone in the middle of the stage, with everybody looking at him. But he was not ready to invest the efforts and to use every means to get to that position. He was very proud and happy though when he was elected to the presidency of the British Society of Psyc