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.
Balint once wrote that his work was "known, tolerated, perhaps even read, but certainly not quoted." Unfortunately, Balint is one of those important psychoanalytic thinkers who has remained a marginal figure, never quite influencing the mainstream of psychoanalytic theory. His untimely death in 1970 came perhaps before the completion of his research and any chance to summarize conclusions from it. Sutherland, in his obituary,1 suggested that an appraisal of Balint's work would be a major task. This study of Balint by Franck Faure, a French specialist on Balint, does much to make clear the main themes of Balint's work and the development of his theoretical position and suggests the relevance of Balint for much that has developed later in psychoanalytic theorizing.
Faure concentrates on the written works, eschewing the less accessible oral tradition of the Balint groups in existence in England and on the Continent. The study proceeds in a biographical manner, beginning with the brief, brilliant years of the "Budapest school" and the influence of Ferenczi on the development of Balint's ideas. Following Balint's flight to safety in England in 1939, when he took up residence in Manchester, a period of withdrawal or apparent unproductivity set in. Faure suggests that this period was difficult professionally, financially, personally, and psychologically. A new phase of Balint's work began with his appointment to a position in London in 1945. In 1948 he joined the staff of the Tavistock Clinic and worked there at first with the Family Discussion Bureau (1948-1953). Later he began his very significant work with general practitioners' groups (from 1953 onward).
Faure insists strongly on the unity of Balint's work and attempts to show how the later Balint of The Basic Fault2 developed out of his