Introduction

Michael Balint, one of the most searching and innovative members of the second generation of psychoanalysts, was a product of the Budapest School of Psychoanalysis and the analysand of its founder, Sandor Ferenczi. I first met him at the Tavistock Clinic in the 1950s, then at its home in Beaumont Street, W1, in the Harley Street area, when I went to see him for advice on psychotherapy training. He was then a solid middle-aged man of medium height with a marked Hungarian accent and a direct and forthright manner. When he was later the supervisor of my first psycho-analytical training case, I came to value this directness, together with his ability to admit error; yet others occasionally found him rather bullying, particularly in seminars, although this was a trait I never experienced with him. However, we all acknowledged his capacity to challenge and question everything, never to take things for granted, in order to help people to think for themselves, and in this respect he resembled both Ferenczi and Freud. Ferenczi, the master in his time of psychoanalytic technique and experimentation, the fearless theoretician, was the model other than Freud on which Balint based himself as an analyst. Throughout his life, he acknowledged his unresolved positive transference and indebtedness to him. In a way following his mentors, the main directions of his researches were in the development of human relationships and of individual sexual functioning. Unlike them, his approach was less speculative, being more derived through his clinical observations of the analytic situation and the influence of psychoanalytic technique on both patient and analyst.

In the three fields, object relationships, sexuality and psychoanalytic technique, his views and concepts developed over a period of some forty years, and the aim of the first part of this book is to give an account of these developments as recorded in his published works. He was not a tidy thinker. His ideas were developed piecemeal