Chapter 6 Critiques and Further Developments

In this chapter I want to devote myself to the surveys and critiques of Balint’s work that have been published, largely since his death in 1970. It is a regrettable fact that this highly innovative and creative work has to some extent not received the credit and acceptance that I believe it deserves. One of the main reasons for this, I believe, is that he has not given his readers sufficient clinical material to allow them to judge for themselves the correctness or usefulness of these theories. Most other major psychoanalytical writers have supported their theoretical views with the clinical evidence on which the theories are based, and this has critically helped the understanding of their theoretical positions. Balint has not done himself justice even though, to remind you, as early as 1932 he stated in his paper on ‘Character Analysis and New Beginning’ that ‘without clinical examples, any discussion of technique is useless’. He should have followed his valuable advice himself.

However, the relative absence of clinical illustration does not apply in the same degree to his applied work and there is no obvious reason for this discrepancy. It could be suggested that he became more interested in applied work to the detriment of the pure, but the evidence does not support this since (1) his writings in pure work continued up to his death, and (2) his writings on pure work lacked much clinical illustration from the beginning of his career as a psychoanalyst. It remains a mystery.

One unfortunate result of this deficiency of illustration in his pure work is that it tends to make his work less vital and interesting to read, and this is regrettable since in clinical discussions, both as a supervisor and seminar leader, he could be vibrant and dynamic in his understanding and conceptualizing of clinical material. In his technique, he was a classical analyst, mainly concerned with understanding conflicts arising from the defensive ego structures against the id-driven derivativ