Response to Martin Stanton

I was delighted that my paper in the BJP (Gerrard 2000) provoked such interest but I must admit I somewhat reeled from the ferocity of Martin Stanton's attack on my understanding of Balint. I had not set out, as he does so cogently, to give the reader an understanding of The Basic Fault and, as he rightly says, I did extract Balint's thoughts about interpretation of the transference to write a clinical paper of my own. However, it is rather disturbing that he feels I have ‘distorted’ Balint's theory.

As Balint writes, the basic fault is

a two-person relationship in which, however, only one of the partners matters; his wishes and needs are the only ones that count and must be attended to; the other partner, though felt to be immensely powerful, matters only in so far as he is willing to gratify the first partner's needs and desires or decides to frustrate them…. (Balint 1968, p. 23)

This led me to the clinical vignette quoted in full in the paper (Gerrard 2000, pp. 401-2). It is Balint's illustration of the above, but nevertheless the thoughts I offered about it are not negated by Balint's description of the patient in the area of the basic fault. Indeed Balint's response to his patient was an interpretation of the transference operating at the time between them, and indeed serves ‘to highlight the separateness and otherness of the analyst and/or patient’ (Stanton 2001, p. 546). Balint recognized his patient's distress and then admitted that he did not feel the extra session would be powerful enough to give him what he expected and needed. He then continued to add that this would make the patient small and weak whilst his analyst would become great and powerful. What was this if not a transference interpretation?

The original state of harmony with one's environment having been disturbed by the discovery of separate objects, Balint posits, leads to the ocnophilic or philobatic response to try to recreate the original harmony. I agree with Stanton that they are both omnipo