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Back in 1902, Dr. Sigmund Freud, keen to explore and to promote his burgeoning clinical discoveries, created the world's very first psychoanalytical study group in Vienna, Austria. Boldly, Freud invited four local medical colleagues—Dr. Alfred Adler, Dr. Max Kahane, Dr. Rudolf Reitler, and Dr. Wilhelm Stekel—to visit him at his home on Wednesday evenings in order to discuss the rather radical “Redecur” (i.e., the “talking cure”)—at that point, a most unusual approach to the treatment of mental illness. This tiny inaugural psychoanalytical community consisted of so few members that each one of those pioneers will no doubt have absorbed every detail of one another's biographies, case studies, and professional interests with little difficulty at all.
As the century progressed, the field of psychoanalysis became increasingly professionalized and internationalized, so much so that, nowadays, literally hundreds of thousands of mental health professionals on every continent have come to provide psychological treatment through an overtly Freudian lens. Those of us committed to the classical psychoanalytical approach must regard this as rather good news indeed.
However, owing to the fact that psychoanalysis has now expanded globally and has continued to attract newer generations of younger and younger practitioners, the old pioneers of this industry have become increasingly overlooked and, indeed, in many instances, completely forgotten. Although everyone will of course be only too familiar with Sigmund Freud and Anna Freud, as well as with such core ancestral figures as Sándor Ferenczi, Carl Gustav Jung, Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott, Jacques Lacan, and John Bowlby, many of the other early contributors have, alas, become more and more marginalized in our minds.
Several decades ago, as a young student at the Tavistock Clinic in London, quite a number of my teachers would often refer to Dr. Michael Balint, a Hungarian-born, British-based psychoanalyst, on quite a frequent basi