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This book contains the papers that represent Balint’s contributions to the theory and practice of psychoanalysis from the years 1930 to 1952 and I shall consider those that seem most relevant to the general thrust of his thinking. In the Preface, he gives a brief overall view of his work:
After having ambivalently criticized The Interpretation of Dreams and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, I was at the age of 21 decisively and definitely conquered for psychoanalysis by the Three Contributions and Totem and Taboo. In some form or other, these two directions of research—the development of the individual sexual function and the development of human relationships—have remained in the focus of my interest ever since. Coming from medicine, and strongly biased by my predilection for the exact sciences, my approach to these two problems was mainly, though not exclusively, through clinical observation; this meant studying the processes as they develop and change under the impact of the analytical situation in the patient, that is, studying the psychoanalyst’s technique and the patient’s responses to it. This volume collects my papers written during the years 1930–1952 on these three intimately interlinked topics—human sexuality, object-relations, and psychoanalytic technique.
It would be true to say that all of his subsequent publications continued the task of researching and exploring these three topics.
His very first psychoanalytic paper, ‘Perversion or a Hysterical Symptom?’, was written in 1925 and is not included in this book but is published in his second volume, Problems of Human Pleasure and Behaviour (1956). It concerns the topic of homosexuality, and it gives a brief clinical account of whether a patient’s symptoms should be considered a perversion or hysterical in nature. It already reveals his enquiring and questioning mind, particularly in the highlighting of the deficiencies and limitations of the current knowledge of psychoanalysis at the time of