Biographical Sketch

Michael Balint was born in Budapest on 3 December 1896. He came from a middle-class Jewish family, the family name being Bergsmann. His father was a general practitioner, practising in Josefstadt, the largely Jewish quarter of Budapest, and it was here that he spent his formative years. On growing up, he changed his name to the more Hungarian one of Balint and was also converted to the Unitarian faith. (I am indebted to André Haynal’s book The Technique at Issue for many of these facts.) He had a younger sister, Emmi, who studied mathematics and was at school with two future analysts, Margaret Mahler and Alice Szekely-Kovacs, his future wife.

He enrolled as a medical student but soon afterwards was conscripted for military service at the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. He saw active service in Russia and Italy but was then severely wounded in the hand, giving it a rather claw-like deformity. The injury was thought to be either self-inflicted to escape military service or the result of foolhardiness in allowing his natural curiosity to get the better of him by trying to dismantle a hand-grenade. Whichever it was, he was discharged from the army and resumed his medical studies, qualifying as a doctor in 1918, with a special interest in biology and biochemistry. As a student he had read The Interpretation of Dreams and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life and was ambivalently critical of them, but in 1917 he was conquered for psycho-analysis by Three Essays on Sexuality and Totem and Taboo, with two topics, the development of sexual functioning and the development of human relations, remaining the focus of his future work. Shortly after qualification, he married Alice, and their relationship, living and working together, was extremely harmonious.

Following the end of the First World War in 1918, the Communist Republic of Bela Kun was established in Hungary and was actively supported by the young progressives such as Balint. By 1919, the regime had been overthrow