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Dr. Alice Bálint denies that Ferenczi with his pronounced individualism and changes of method founded any school in Budapest which would agree on the results to be obtained from any one form of technique, while she proceeds to shew that some of his ideas can be applied with discrimination. Thus, she thinks that the analyst should prove his rectitude and lack of hypocrisy to the patient by confirming correct
suspicions of some negative attitude hidden by the analyst's silence; e.g. acknowledging that such and such an action of his really disturbed the analyst's friendly attention. She believes that the patient's re-living of early more or less paranoid sensitiveness to the variations of adult behaviour, then not acknowledged and not to be criticised, should be actively altered in the present by such acknowledgments, which prove to the patient the incorrectness of his phantasy that the analyst is an angel, and not a human being like himself. Dr. Bálint would employ such a method rarely and carefully. She believes that the patient's narrow and one-sided, though, intense awareness of the analyst can sometimes be corrected only in this way, and that interpretation alone may lead to further repetition of difficult situations rather than to their solution. Seeking to measure the value of Ferenczi's work by its truths rather than by its weaknesses Dr. Bálint touches on such questions as the substitution of the conception of 'primary narcissism' by that of 'passive (egoistic) object love', the influence of the environment on infantile sexuality, and the importance of elasticity of the analyst's attitude in order to promote free criticism of him as forming the present (analytical) environment. This paper deals with attitude rather than with the rôle of interpretations in handling the transference, and the author thinks that the designation of an analyst's technique in this respect as merely 'active' or 'passive' is not sufficiently precise, since behaviour is an activi