The Basic Fault

The concept of the basic fault was elaborated by Michael Balint , a psychoanalyst of Hungarian origin who practised primarily in England, where he belonged, with D.W. Winnicott, to the Independent or Middle Group arising from the split in the British Psychoanalytic Society, following the divergences of opinion between Anna Freud and Melanie Klein. His second analyst was Sándor Ferenczi and this filiation can easily be recognised in his way of considering the analytic relationship.

This concept refers to severe narcissistic defects and to the way they manifest themselves during an analysis, a certain change of tonality indicating that the patient has regressed to what Balint called the “area of the basic fault”, a fault attesting to a seriously and chronically defective tuning between the infant and the primary environment. He proposes a new topography, defining an area of the psychical apparatus where there is a “two-person” relationship and where pre-oedipal functioning predominates. It is a matter of identifying the moment when this area is “disturbed” in order to respond adequately by adjusting technique to the patient's needs for whom it is necessary to provide the equivalent of favourable primary environment that did not exist or not sufficiently. Alongside the basic fault, there is the oedipal area involving three-person relationships and the area of creation where the subject is alone. It should be noted that Balint rejects the Freudian notion of primary narcissism, recognising only primary love; for him, narcissism is always secondary, a withdrawal into the self, following a disappointment in relation to the object.

The patient in question was a woman whose narcissism was fragile. The analyst sometimes asked herself if she was going to be able to tolerate the frustrations inherent to the analytic situation. The patient's obsessive jealousy and her mistrustful, suspicious, querulous and even procedural side also led the analyst at certain moments to fear an evo