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Harold Stewart's book, published in The New Library of Psychoanalysis Series (Volume 25), provides a stimulating and admirably clear account of Michael Balint's contribution to psychoanalysis and applied psychoanalysis as well as painting an absorbing picture of Balint himself.
After a brief biographical sketch and a useful introductory summary, the author describes and examines the development of Balint's theoretical concepts drawn from his clinical experience with patients, and shows how, concurrently with these ideas and experiences, Balint refined his views on analytic technique. He shows how central to these developments was Balint's contention that from the earliest beginnings the infant exists and develops in a state of intense relatedness to his environment. Building on the work of Ferenczi, Balint was among the first to envisage regression as a therapeutic tool, not solely as a defence, and how in favourable circumstances it may provide an opportunity for the individual to discover new ways of loving - Balint's
new beginning' - where healthy developments in relation to objects have miscarried.
Balint gradually moved away from his original concept of an early passive relationship to the primary object, postulating instead an earliest, primitive relationship of ‘harmonious mix-up’ of subject and object containing many active features. Out of this primitive relationship, which Balint termed ‘primary object love’, both normal and pathological paths of development arise as with birth, separation and inevitable frustrations the harmonious mix-up gives way to discrete objects. The author lucidly outlines the development of these ideas and the clinical importance Balint attached to them, from his earliest analytic writings to their fullest synthesis, as set out in The Basic Fault . Here, Balint introduced his concept of a structural deficiency in the mind (the ‘basic fault’), arising from early and significant discrepancies between the bio-psychological needs of the i