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A number of Balint’s papers have not been incorporated into book form, and I select those on two topics that add originality of thought to psycho-analysis. The first topic is a theory of trauma and the second, observations on psychoanalytical education.
The paper, ‘Trauma and Object Relationship’, was written in 1969 for the last number of Volume 50 of the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis to celebrate the half-century of its publication. Balint first examines Freud’s ideas on trauma, and he shows that
psychoanalysis had two theories for the aetiology of the neuroses. The older one of the two assumes the existence of an early sexual trauma and our understanding of its effects is based essentially on metapsychological, i.e. economic, considerations. The crucial event comes from outside, and the individual is unprepared for it, it causes a break in the protective shield against stimuli and floods the mind with an excessive amount of excitation. In order to deal with the excessive amount of stimulation, a compulsion to repeat is set in motion, the clinical expression of which is in certain cases a neurotic symptom.
The new [second] theory starts with the assumption that the trauma, in spite of its appearance, is not an external event; it is produced by the individual himself as a fantasy. It cannot claim easily that the individual was unprepared and was flooded by an excessive amount of excitation because, after all, it was he himself who produced the phantasy; on the other hand, it can claim the existence of very high intensity strains between the various parts of the mental apparatus, for instance, the id which forced the ego to indulge in fantasy-making and the super-ego which orders that this activity should be suppressed…. I propose to call this new theory essentially structural.
He notes that in Analysis Terminable and Interminable (1937:220), Freud suggested the term ‘alteration of the ego’, which is the result of an interaction between congenital