Following Balint's concept of malignant regression, I suggest that this concept defines and relates to regression to malignant relations with the early environment and is not (as Balint states) malignant in itself. The intra-psychic imprint of these traumatic relations that occurred yet not experienced, have been incorporated forcefully and infiltrated deeply, being sensed as part of the true self; it is dissociated from its origin and is repeated over and over compulsively in the intersubjective field in general, and in the analytic relations in particular. It constitutes the unrepresented and inaccessible unconscious and presents itself in enactments and acting out in the analytic relations both directly and in role-reversal. The analyst is drawn into them in mutual dissociation.

Regarding these phenomena as regression to malignant relations and not as intrinsically malignant, enables the analyst to contain them and understand them as such, and provides for the patient an environment that facilitates the experience of those states; such regression to dependence (Winnicott) enables the patient to represent those psychic states, and work them through as lived psychic states that promote transformation and mental growth.