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Michael Balint is known to most psychoanalysts for his work using therapeutic regression as explored in his famous book, The Basic Fault (1968). In Balint Matters, Jonathan Sklar fills a gap in the literature surrounding Balint's other contributions involving the study of psychosomatics and the related “art” (as Sklar aptly calls it) of effectively assessing patients’ presenting problems. Sklar's psychoanalytic heritage and involvement in the British Independent Group tradition—in particular, Ferenczi's and Balint's legacy of thought—provide a deep foundation for such an endeavor. Added to his psychoanalytic lineage, which includes an analysis with Enid Balint and supervisions with Paula Heimann, Harold Stewart, and Pearl King, Sklar brings a wide-ranging experience of psychosomatic assessment to bear from his psychiatric training at Friern and Royal Free Hospitals, his psychotherapy training at the Tavistock Clinic, his positions as consultant and head of the psychotherapy department at Addenbrooke's and Fulbourn Hospitals in Cambridge, his experiences as a Training Analyst and Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society, his decades as a Balint group leader with cohorts of physicians, and his long-standing and ongoing consultation work groups in Chicago and across Eastern Europe.
In some ways this book is akin to the scholarly and original clinical integrations of Sklar's first book, Landscapes of the Dark: History, Trauma, Psychoanalysis, (2011) in that it incorporates the work of psychoanalytic forebears into the realities of today's clinical practice. Whereas Landscapes of the Dark focused on the psychoanalytic history of Ferenczi's and Balint's contributions to the field of regression and the ensuing understandings that inform the treatment of traumatized patients nowadays, the new book hones in on the implications of Balint's extensive work with physicians and their dilemmas in assessing patients’ psychosomatic presentations. Sklar's synthesis of Balint's i