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This memoir is the result of a series of tape-recorded interviews conducted for the Columbia University Oral History Research Office by Dr. Bluma Swerdloff with Dr. Michael Balint in London, England, August 6-7, 1965. Dr. Balint has read the transcript, and has made only minor corrections and emendations. The reader is asked to bear in mind, therefore, that he is reading a transcript of the spoken rather than the written word.
Q: Suppose we start with how you got into the field of psychoanalysis? What influences worked on you?
MB: Well, you see, it's a very long story. I read the first analytic writings, by Freud and Ferenczi, when I was still in—I don't know what you call it in America—high school.
Q: Gymnasium?
MB: Gymnasium. I was always interested. But this was not in anything particular; I read everything that ever was written on painting—quite a few things, comparative religion, law, philosophy, history, archeology and heaven knows what, …
Q: How did you manage to do that? What stimulated you, in your own background?
MB: I think I just was interested in books at that time.
Q: What about your family? What was the factor?
MB: Mother was a very simple woman. Her readings did not go very far. Father was a general practitioner, a rather disappointed man, a bright man;
Address correspondence to Mary Marshall Clark, Columbia University Oral History Research Office, 801 Butler Library, Box 20, 535 West 114th Street, New York, N.Y. 10027.
Address correspondence to Mary Marshall Clark, Columbia University Oral History Research Office, 801 Butler Library, Box 20, 535 West 114th Street, New York, N.Y. 10027.