Chapter 7 Applied Psychoanalysis

Balint, from his early years as a psychoanalyst in Budapest, had always been a keen exponent of the value of the application of psychoanalytic principles and insights to other fields of medical and social practice. Freud, in his paper ‘Lines of Advance in Psychoanalytic Therapy’ (1919), had been the first advocate of this use of psychoanalysis to help patients who, for many reasons, were unable to avail themselves of full analysis: ‘the large-scale application of our therapy will compel us to alloy the pure gold of analysis freely with the copper of direct suggestion; and hypnotic influence, too, might find a place in it again, as it has in the treatment of war neuroses’ (p.168).

Ferenczi, too, had been interested in the psychological aspects of medical practice. André Haynal (1988) in his book The Technique at Issue, which discusses controversies in psychoanalysis from Freud and Ferenczi to Balint, states that ‘he [Ferenczi] observes that “the personality of the physician often has a greater affect on the patient than the medicine prescribed”. This observation is the point of departure for Michael Balint’s ideas on medical education’ (:92). He further quotes Ferenczi as wondering ‘How the future medical student will acquire this profound self-knowledge [of psychoanalytic sensitivity] is a difficult question to answer’ (92). He continues:

By way of reply, Balint set up ‘training and research groups for general practitioners’, on the lines of the Hungarian psychoanalytic system. Before the development of the Berlin Institute’s so-called ‘tripartite’ training system, which calls for personal analysis, courses on theory, and supervision, the Budapest school made no such clear-cut distinction between these three aspects of training. Hungarian candidates associated freely in their own analyses around the cases they were treating. Balint thought that it should be possible to create a training for general practitioners that would bring about a limited though considerable ch