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When the National Health Service came to post-war Britain, general practice was at a low ebb. The family doctors thought that inferior status had been allocated to them, compared with their colleagues in the hospitals.
A pronouncement that general practitioners were
doctors who had fallen off the ladder of success was particularly galling. It was a gaffe by a medical Peer, a member of the very Establishment that had failed to teach its students that patients had minds as well as brains.
How frustrating to find the waiting-room full of hypochondriacs with nothing wrong with them!—nothing, that is, that could be detected by the equipment provided at medical school. Relief came from the Tavistock Clinic in London, where Michael and Enid Balint offered psychoanalytical work group seminars for GPs. They succeeded brilliantly in attracting doctors willing to make an attempt to understand the problems that were on their patients' minds.
Michael Balint's book reporting on this work was widely studied both at home and abroad. A groundswell of approval confirmed that the Balints understood the perplexity of doctors faced with so many baffling psychological and psychosomatic phenomena. The style was invigorating, enthusiasm was great, confidence began to return. There came into being a Balint Society and an International Balint Society with its own journal.
The present volume reassesses progress almost half a century later, during which a reversal has taken place—hospital doctors contemplate budgetary cuts and closed wards while general practice flourishes: 'Formal training for general practice is statutory. Academic departments of general practice are country wide. General practice literature is burgeoning. Research is fashionable. The health service is undergoing radical change. Where does the spirit of Balint blow?' (p. 93).
This is an account, including transcripts of tapes, of a Balint group of a specialised