Reply to Discussion by Enid Balint

Participating with Mrs. Balint in this dialogue is a special pleasure for me, and I would like to thank her for the great care with which she read my paper and for directly responding to its central points not only in their immediate context but in their broader implications as well. It is no small accomplishment that she was able to discuss with such clarity and depth the ideas of someone representing an alternative school of thought and also to sacrifice neither the areas of interface with her own viewpoint nor the shades of contrast and differences in emphasis. I am particularly appreciative of the graceful style—one might say, the aesthetics of her writing—with which she expresses those thoughts that touch on issues of possible disagreement. It is a style that is understated and gentle in tone—reflective rather than rhetorical, but nonetheless penetrating and creatively evocative. Aesthetics and its relevance to the psychoanalytic process are, of course, the issue that the present paper has attempted to address, at least in one of its aspects, and to which I would like to return somewhat more broadly in my reply to Mrs. Balint's discussion. Consider the following statement by Levenson (1972):

[T]he core of psychotherapy lies in the delineation of pattern, the formal structure of events that constitutes what might be called the aesthetics of experience—aesthetics not in the vulgate sense of beauty and light but, more precisely, meaning sensitivity and perception, that is, concerned with the forms and organization of sensory experience, rather than content and meaning [p. 211].

Nowhere is this emphasis better represented than by Enid Balint's portrayal of the analytic relationship as facilitating the patient's ability to experience himself as an “I” that can freely assert, “This is not me” as well as “This is me.” Her vision of the patient's “self” as an entity that is owned by the patient rather than the core of the patient is not simply a matter of semantic