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This book, Balint’s second, was published in 1957. It consists of a number of articles and reviews of a more general nature and does not set out to develop any particular themes in depth nor to develop any of the themes from his previous book other than peripherally. These articles and reviews were published in a variety of journals over the period 1923– 56 and show Balint’s interests and thinking over a wide variety of subjects. The book is divided into three sections, entitled ‘The Individual and the Community’, ‘Clinical Problems’ and ‘Men and their Ideas’.
Balint had from early on in his career been concerned with the social aspects of psychoanalysis and was friendly with like-minded colleagues, such as Geza Roheim and Otto Fenichel, who constituted a left-wing, radical progressive group of the psychoanalysts in Budapest. These interests are evidenced in the topics selected in the first section on the individual and the community, and include ‘Sex and Society’ (1956); ‘The Problem of Discipline’ (1951a); ‘The Adolescent’s Fight against Masturbation’ (1934a); ‘The Psychological Problems of Growing Old’ (1933a); ‘On Punishing Offenders’ (1951b); and ‘Notes on the Dissolution of Object-representation in Modern Art’ (1952d). The essays demonstrate a very extensive knowledge of cultural, artistic and social affairs, the product of the cultured intelligentsia of Central Europe. Interestingly, this section also includes a chapter on individual differences of behaviour in early infancy as evidenced by the sucking rhythms of bottle-fed infants, for which he devised a method to record them. He hoped by this to establish ‘deeply rooted, innate, constitutional differences between different individuals’ (1956a: 149); that is, something that is not determined by social factors in the environment. He believed that the importance of his findings was to show that these individual differences in sucking rhythms could be demonstrated in the very first days of life. This study in 19