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At first glance Dr. Michael Balint's book, to which Enid Balint has contributed a chapter entitled 'Distance in Space and Time', appears to be an easy book to review. He writes of exciting, thrilling things, of fun fairs and switchbacks, of children's games and dreams of flying, of air and water and of sand and words. He writes of people who love their independence and the friendly open spaces, who seek dizzying spills and frightening thrills, who seek to master the skills of an acrobat. For these people he has coined the term 'philobats'.
He speaks as well of timid people, of people who cling to people and things, of people who hate the horrid empty spaces, of people who dread being caught off balance. He coins another term to describe such people. They are the 'ocnophils'.
But closer reading reveals that his book deals with weighty matters, that his arguments are well thought out and that he has touched explicitly or implicitly on so many matters of on-going concern to analysts that a full review could well become a book in itself!
In essence Dr. Balint has written a book on ego psychology with particular reference to the economic aspects. The subject-matter represents a continuation of the author's abiding interest in two directions of research: the tracing of the erotic instinct from its earliest biological beginnings to its highest manifestations in human beings and the tracing of the development of the object-relations of the individual. He reiterates his belief that the development of object-relations cannot be fully explained on the basis of its being completely secondary to the development of instinctual aims. Instinctual aims and object-relations, although continuously influencing each other, are none the less fundamentally different processes. There is, he maintains, too much uncritical use of the adjective 'oral' for the description of everything primitive, and he points to the almost complete neglect of theoretical notions,