You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Michael Balint describes the state of 'primary object love', an early developmental phase arrived at from divergent approaches in the Budapest School (A. and M. Balint, I. Hermann). Primary object love must occur very early in life, and all later object relationships can be traced back to it. This form of object relation is not linked to any erotogenic zone, 'but is something on its own'. Its biological basis is the instinctual interdependence of mother and child (dual-unit). The instinctual gratification in this phase never goes beyond the forepleasure, i.e., 'the tranquil, quiet sense of well-being'. The early severance of this relationship accounts for the later manifestations in infancy of increased clinging and insatiable greed. Numerous observations of infant behavior support the assumption of this phase of primary object love and thus contradict the theory, and question the existence of primary narcissism.
Since the date of this paper (1937) the concept of primary narcissism has been clarified and it does encompass the 'fused' mother-child relationship in which the cathexis between self and object is indistinct. There is also clinical evidence that the instinctual goal in this phase is a melting together with the mother through the achievement of identical temperature.