Chapter 3 Thrills and Regressions (1959)

With this book, published in 1959, Balint continues with his exploration of the development of primitive attitudes and object relationships in his patients in the course of the analytic situation. As the title suggests, it is mainly concerned with the related phenomena of thrills and regressions, both of which can be readily experienced not only in analysis but also in everyday life situations, the most common being the experiences that people have at fun-fairs.

In his Introduction, he gives an account of his objections to using the term ‘oral’ to describe everything primitive:

Practically all our technical terms describing the early period of mental life have been derived from objective phenomena and/or subjective experiences of the ‘oral’ sphere; as, for instance: greed, incorporation, introjection, internalization, part-objects; destruction by sucking, chewing and biting; projection according to the pattern of spitting and vomiting; etc. Sadly enough, we have almost completely neglected to enrich our understanding of these very early, very primitive phenomena by creating theoretical notions and coining technical terms using the experiences, imagery, and implications of other spheres. Such spheres are among others: feelings of warmth, rhythmic noises and movements, subdued nondescript humming, the irresistible and overwhelming effects of tastes and smells, of close bodily contact, of tactile and muscle sensations especially in the hands, and the undeniable power of any and all of these for provoking and allaying anxieties and suspicions, blissful contentment, and desperate loneliness.

This constitutes a powerful argument in support of his thesis, first put forward in the book Primary Love and Psychoanalytic Technique (1952), that the development of object relationships and the development of instinctual drives, though continuously influencing each other, are fundamentally different processes. Many of the non-oral primitive phenomena that have just been del