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Dr Michael Balint was influential in Britain both in the development of object relations theory and in the application of analytic ideas outside the consulting room. Harold Stewart, who was a supervisee, offers a respectful critique of his work.
Balint was born in 1896 in Hungary, the son of a general practitioner. He trained as a psychoanalyst in Berlin and Budapest, Ferenczi being his analyst, and by 1935 was director of the Budapest Psychoanalytic Institute. Nazism drove him to England in 1939, first to Manchester. In 1948 he moved to the Tavistock Clinic and, until his death in 1970, he was involved both with the British Psycho-Analytical Society and with practical work in brief psychotherapy, psychosexual medicine and, famously, the training of GPs through case discussion seminars.
In the first part of this book 's developing theory is evaluated through his writings, notably Primary Love and Psycho-Analytic Technique (1952), Thrills and Regressions and The Basic Fault . Stewart compares Balint's theories with those of Freud, Klein, Winnicott and Fairbairn, incidentally providing a guide to the British school of object relations. Balint diverged from Freud on the question of primary narcissism, proposing the idea of primary love with narcissism as a secondary phenomenon. The fundamental nature of the infant's active object seeking has now been confirmed by the researches of Stern and others. Balint and Winnicott shared the view of the infant/mother dyad that led Winnicott notoriously to claim ‘there is no such thing as a baby’, meaning that a baby cannot be considered separately from the mothering it receives. But they differed about hate, which Balint regarded as secondary to disturbance in the experience of primary love and the ‘harmonious inter-penetrating mix-up’ between mother and baby.