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Michael Balint was the son of a general practitioner in Hungary, where he was brought up. He himself became a doctor and a chemist but then veered towards the study of psychoanalysis. In Hungary the psychoanalytic training was under the influence of Sandor Ferenczi and differed in some respects from what had become established in Vienna; in particular, the trainee’s first clinical case was supervised by his own analyst and not by someone else outside the analytic situation, as was the practice elsewhere. This system naturally brought into the foreground the interaction between the two participants, the trainee analyst and his patient, including the counter-transference as well as the transference. By now, years later, this perspective, though not the method of training, has come nearer to being the norm in analytic practice than it was then.
As a consequence of the terrible events in Hitler’s Germany he found himself in 1949, after some years in Manchester, on the staff of the Tavistock Clinic in London. At that time the Clinic had three principal preoccupations: a devotion to the furtherance of psychoanalysis and its social effectiveness; a long-standing tradition of providing postgraduate courses to a variety of mental health workers; and as a result of recent experiences in the armed forces an excitement about groups and their possible uses.
In the field of postgraduate training in general the Clinic staff had by then become increasingly disillusioned with the value of lectures alone. In the case of GPs, as a result of a traditional post-graduate course a doctor was inclined to go back to work considerably impressed by the sagacity of the lecturer but also uncomfortably oppressed by a sense of his own ineptitude; he had a head full of new ideas but no new skills. Balint decided that it was useless to go along this well-worn and largely useless path and that a scrutiny of the work of a GP in the light of psychoanalytic understanding was worth a try.
So it was in this