The following abstracts are edited versions of English summaries which appeared in Forum and are published with the permission of the journal.

The great figures of the Budapest school of psychoanalysis—Sándor Ferenczi, Michael and Alice Balint, Imre Hermann—had a strong influence on the development of modern psychoanalysis, particularly on object relations theory in a broader sense. Ferenzci, in his last papers, and Balint and Hermann, in their complete works, emphasized that there exists a primary object relation at the beginning of human life. Hermann's theory of the clinging instinct is pivotal as a bridge between the drive theory of classical psychoanalysis and modern object relations theory. Object relations theory in a narrower sense—the theory of the inner objects—was not conceptualized systematically in the Hungarian school. But Ferenczi's concept of introjection and some ideas and observations of Balint and Hermann prepared the way for this direction in modern psychoanalytic thinking.