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Enid Balint was a prominent figure in the Independent Group of the British Psychoanalytical Society. She and her husband Michael also developed a group method (known internationally as “Balint groups”) which helps physicians understand unconscious aspects of their relationships with patients. In addition, Balint was a pioneer in marital therapy. She founded the Institute of Marital Studies, which later became Tavistock Relationships. In 1996, the Institute of Marital Studies established an annual lecture in her memory, and in January 2021 it was my honor to present the twenty-sixth Enid Balint Lecture.
This was a special pleasure because Enid was an important figure for me personally in my psychoanalytic life. She supervised my first training case; and when she and Juliet Mitchell were putting together a collection of her papers, she invited me to join the project as coeditor with Juliet. That collection became her book Before I Was I: Psychoanalysis and the Imagination. The invitation to give the Enid Balint Lecture offered a wonderful opportunity for a close rereading of the book, to see how it would strike me today, more than twenty-five years later.
I began reading at both ends of the book: with the introduction, which I wrote myself, and with Juliet's interview with Enid that closes it. The book was published in 1993, so I probably wrote the introduction in 1992, ten years after I had qualified as an analyst. I was interested to see what had struck me particularly in Enid's writing at that stage of my experience. One thing I evidently picked up on is the idea of “aliveness.” I